OurColony.net

Customer Rating:
Summary: literally
Comment: Janet Malcolm's portrayal of Sheila McGough is of conscientiousness gone awry; the over-zealous
lawyer, hired by a con artist names Bob Bailes, guards her client's rights all the way to a prison
cell. McGough found herself in the big house after a conviction for fraud: the "crime" she
commited related to the disbursment of funds Bailes had deposited into her account. It's probably
impossible to relate the complexity of the "crime" and McGough's conviction here, and largely
beside the point: Malcolm's interest is in how the letter of the law moves against its spirit, and
in those, like McGough, whom she feels to be caught in the middle of this dynamic. McGough,
according to Malcolm, suffered from the disease of "literalism," understanding the words and acts
but not the intentions and conventions that govern legal proceedings. Her portrait of McGough is
sympathetic, though she records her own frustration with her as a subject prone to discursive
irrelevancy and excess. Malcolm notes that for the most part McGough's words and action are not
precisely irrelevant: just relevant on a scale incommensurate with the gestural and abbreviated,
and self-serving practice of law as we know it.

I enjoyed this book, though I found it a
puzzle.It's immensly readable, but quite inconsequential in many ways. Malcolm avoids turning this
into a case study of McGough's pathological literalism, which it surely could be, and instead
presents her story as an allegory of the general disparity between intention and precise meaning.
I found McGough, and her family, immensely charming, and found myself, like Malcolm, in sympathy
with McGough's doggedness and loyalty, however misplaced.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Essayist, duped by subject, stumbles
Comment: Malcolm is one of the best. Read the first two paragraphs of THE CRIME OF SHEILA McGOUGH. Not many
writers of Amazon's current Top 100 books can do as well.

But Malcolm's book about a guileless,
professionally tone-deaf lawyer who goes to extraordinary lengths to appeal the conviction of her
client, an affable scamster named Bailes, is a waste of the author's talent.

The book is brief
enough to defeat prematurely tossing it aside in exasperation. But it better could have been a
well-crafted essay on the tawdry McGough episode as an instance of ironies and paradoxes found in
the law.

Instead we get Malcolm recounting her role as a tireless gumshoe, visiting the players
on both sides of the McGough case, turning up nothing sinister or dramatic enough to change the
verdict that sent McGough to prison for three years for helping client in one of his scams.

Was
McGough railroaded? An earlier posting suggested the subject suckered Malcolm in the same way
McGough was hoodwinked by the client. It's hard to disagree with that. I think the author blew a
lot of time on this and added little to our understanding of the law.

A far better book about the
law's lack of clarity, an absolutely riveting one by a then unknown writer who took an enormous
risk for a distant and uncertain payoff, is A CIVIL ACTION, by Jonathan Harr.

Customer Rating:
Summary: a maddening piece of work
Comment: Sheila McGough's real crime was to effectively refuse to defend herself on the pretense that to do
so would require her to speak ill of a client, a client who richly deserved to be spoken ill of
(whether or not that's grammatically correct). For reasons which escape me, Ms. Malcolm sees some
virtue in this and little virtue in the workings of the prosecutor who, after all, only had before
him (1) a complaining victim/witness who provided (rightly or wrongly) direct evidence of Ms.
McGough's claimed misrepresentation; (2) a defendant (Ms. McGough) whose extremely close
association with--and unusual behavior on behalf of---a known con man easily provided visceral and
circumstantial support for the allegations; and (3) a breathtakingly self-destructive impulse on
the part of Ms. McGough not to deny the allegations. Ms. Malcolm seems puzzled by the
prosecutor's inability to ignore all this and somehow peer into Ms. McGough's soul and see
innocence notwithstanding the direct and circumstantial proof. Ms. malcolm's observations on the
quirks of the american legal system are insightful, but the jurors would have had to have been
mind readers not to have convicted. All this assumes, of course, that Ms. McGough was truly
innocent and, notwithstanding my respect for Ms. Malcolm's other work, I am not convinced of that.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Good grief!
Comment: I was shocked to see this book masqerading as investigative journalism. I have never read any of
Malcolm's other work - but I was gravely disappointed.

In brief, Malcolm attempts to unravel the
events leading to the fraud conviction of her "heroine", McGough, a former attorney. What is
painfully apparent to the reader is that Malcolm's adovcacy of McGough is as blind and as
ill-considered as that of McGough for her client.

At the very least, based on what Malcolm tells
us, Sheila McGough was a TERRIBLE lawyer. It seems likely that she was emotionally or mentally
disabled in some way -- one insightful reviewer below guesses autism, and that sounds right.
However, it also seems likely that she committed crimes but Malcolm steadfastly disregards all the
evidence that points that way, calling each of Sheila's misdeeds bad "judgment". Moreover,
Malcolm reveals a lower level of understanding of the legal process than any average court TV
reporter - claiming at one point that it is normal to notarize documents that the notary has not
witnessed the signing of - please, folks, don't try this one at home.

Malcolm also reads way too
much into transcripts, brief interviews, etc. -- great novelization skills, but for non-fiction,
way too heavy handed.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Not as good as her typical work
Comment: The idea of the book was intriguing (truth rests not on objective standards but on competing
narratives and our evaluation of the plausibility of those narratives), but unfortunately, Malcolm
chose a dreadful way to demonstrate it. As she noted repeatedly, none of McGough's legal contacts
had much interest in her story, and Malcolm did not succeed in making me care, either about McGough
or the issues at hand--an ironic case of hoist on your own petard.