From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Chicago-based journalist Bogira's first book is an outstanding journey inside the American criminal justice system that nicely complements last year's Blue Blood, Edward Conlon's inside look at the life of a big-city cop. Like that instant classic, this book—centered on the Cook County Criminal Courthouse, "the biggest and busiest felony courthouse in the nation"—punctures the popular myths engendered by TV shows like Law and Order to provide a balanced view of the realities of the day-to-day, assembly-line grind that marks so much of the process from arrest to final disposition. The author's ability to gain the trust of so many different participants in the grim drama—judges, public defenders, prosecutors, court officers, prison guards and many defendants—is remarkable, and he often comes close to presenting a more complete picture of the truth of a particular crime than emerge in court in the or in the few cases that actually go to trial. Despite this access, Bogira does not gild the people he describes; even Judge Daniel Locallo, the book's central figure—whose courtroom witnesses racial violence, pathetic thievery, the abused and the mentally incompetent, and who, on balance emerges positively—is portrayed warts and all. The brilliance of Bogira's insights will lead many to hope that he will follow this debut with proposals to cure the many ills he has diagnosed. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In 1998, journalist Bogira spent a year scrutinizing the workings of a Cook County criminal courtroom in Chicago. The result is an eye-opening look at criminal justice in America, where color and class often determine the judicial outcome. The defendants are overwhelmingly black drug-users with limited opportunities. But Bogira also offers insight into those who work in the system--judges, public defenders, prosecutors, clerks, and court bailiffs. He covers a number of typical cases that lead to pleas but focuses on an atypical case of a white youth charged with the brutal beating of a 13-year-old black youth who wandered into a white enclave. The accused is the son of a union official with Mob ties as well as community ties with the presiding judge, all of which creates interesting courtroom dynamics. Drawing on interviews and his own observations, Bogira offers a keen perspective on a single courtroom and the broader social implications that should concern us all. Readers interested in social issues and the criminal justice system will be engrossed. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“In this important and illuminating work, Steve Bogira shines a blazing new light on America’s criminal justice system. This book is filled with one revelatory insight after another about how that system really works. And in his stories about the people–from the judge and the lawyers to the defendants–whose lives come together in a single American courtroom, in a single year, Mr. Bogira shows that he is a masterful reporter not only of our country’s criminal justice system but also of human beings caught up in its gears.” —Robert A. Caro

“Courtroom 302 is a wonderfully vivid portrait of a criminal courtroom in the nation’s busiest courthouse, and of the cops and robbers, lawyers, judges, and assorted creatures of the law who arrive there. It makes informative and often moving reading.” —Scott Turow

“Brilliant . . . A genuine eye-opener. Bogira supplements his acute observations with meticulous research . . . He has produced a compelling narrative that is often more entertaining than most of the cop shows which are so popular on American television.” —The Economist

“Gripping . . . Bogira captures the unspoken realities of the criminal justice system . . . Triumphant in its detail.” —David Feige, The Washington Post

“Steve Bogira is a brilliant reporter and observer, who also happens to be one masterful storyteller. Courtroom 302 is as honest and gritty as they come, and filled with surprises. It’s one of the most important books on America’s criminal justice system to come along in years.” —Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here

“Riveting . . . An immensely important book that exposes how America’s criminal justice system really works . . . Its steady stream of powerful insights inevitably apply to every big city court system in the nation.” —Tom McNamee, Chicago Sun-Times

“The view of America that this book opens up is disturbing, and also fresh and fascinating. But Courtroom 302 isn’t merely sociological. It’s full of human drama, unearthed from the dreary and quotidian by an author with a remarkably fair and open mind.” —Tracy Kidder, author of The Soul of a New Machine and Mountains Beyond Mountains

“A rare, richly detailed look at criminal justice . . . Well-written, meticulously researched . . . A vivid tapestry of the day-in and day-out workings of criminal justice, ranging from the mundane to the bizarre and from the humorous to the gut-wrenchingly sad.” —Maurice Possley, Chicago Tribune

“So insider-ish, so candid, that it will shock, awe, and generally stick in the mind for a long time . . . So much in Courtroom 302 is revelatory that the revelations cannot even be summarized in a normal-length newspaper review . . . Important, compelling.” —Steve Weinberg, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“An eye-opener. Bogira is a journalist who knows his trade as well as anyone I’ve encountered in recent years. A remarkable book.” —Studs Terkel

“Too rarely a book appears that seems immediately essential, critical to an understanding of the culture and time in which we live. Steve Bogira’s Courtroom 302 is such a book. Animated by fact and the moral vitality that has distinguished urban novelists from Dickens through Algren, Courtroom 302 is a compelling account of the brutal reality that passes for justice in America.” —Stuart Dybek

“Steve Bogira reveals how our court system really works—and it is nothing like you see on television. He takes readers past the metal detectors, into a felony courtroom—and inside the minds of judges, lawyers, and defendants alike. Along the way, he exposes the bureaucracy that feeds America’s prisons, delivering fresh insights into how America ended up with the world’s highest rate of imprisonment. Courtroom 302 is a triumph of narrative journalism and a must-read for anyone concerned about the state of justice in America.” —Jennifer Gonnerman, author of Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett

“Courtroom 302 is a dispassionate work of journalistic precision, a smart, subtle broadside against a criminal justice system that feeds upon the poor and dispossessed. The waste of an unenforceable drug prohibition, the number-crunching senselessness of assembly-line plea bargaining, the willful blindness by judges, lawyers and sheriff’s deputies to the very human element itself—all of it is rendered through the careful and honest examination of one Chicago courtroom. Steve Bogira has written a book that detail by detail, reveals the chasm between law and justice and, in the end, shames us all.” —David Simon, author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

“For fans of Law & Order, CSI, and other crime dramas dominating prime time today, Steve Bogira offers the real thing . . . Meticulously reported.” —Ann LoLordo, Baltimore Sun

“An outstanding journey inside the American criminal justice system [that] punctures the popular myths . . . The author’s ability to gain the trust of so many different participants in the grim drama [is] remarkable.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An addictive portrait of an American courtroom . . . Eye-opening and bold from the start . . . Modern-day muckraking at its best.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Inside Flap
Steve Bogira’s riveting book takes us into the heart of America’s criminal justice system. Courtroom 302 is the story of one year in one courtroom in Chicago’s Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country.

We see the system through the eyes of the men and women who experience it, not only in the courtroom but in the lockup, the jury room, the judge’s chambers, the spectators’ gallery. When the judge and his staff go to the scene of the crime during a burglary trial, we go with them on the sheriff’s bus. We witness from behind the scenes the highest-profile case of the year: three young white men, one of them the son of a reputed mobster, charged with the racially motivated beating of a thirteen-year-old black boy. And we follow the cases that are the daily grind of the court, like that of the middle-aged man whose crack addiction brings him repeatedly back before the judge.
Bogira shows us how the war on drugs is choking the system, and how in most instances justice is dispensed–as, under the circumstances, it must be–rapidly and mindlessly. The stories that unfold in the courtroom are often tragic, but they no longer seem so to the people who work there. Says a deputy in 302: “You hear this stuff every day, and you’re like, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s get this over with and move on to the next thing.’”

Steve Bogira is, as Robert Caro says, “a masterful reporter.” His special gift is his understanding of people–and his ability to make us see and understand them. Fast-paced, gripping, and bursting with character and incident, Courtroom 302 is a unique illumination of our criminal court system that raises fundamental issues of race, civil rights, and justice.

About the Author
Steve Bogira graduated from Northwestern University and has been a prize winning writer for the Chicago Reader since 1981. He is a former Alicia Patterson Fellow. He lives with his wife in Evanston, Illinois.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Every day, Chicago police wagons swing onto the grounds of the Cook County Criminal Courthouse and deposit their cargo at a rear door.

The prisoners being unloaded on this particular evening—January 20, 1998—are here for the usual reasons. They sold cocaine rocks on a corner, until an unmarked car screeched up out of nowhere. They tried to buy heroin from an undercover cop. They pocketed a fifth of booze at a grocery and failed to outrun the security guard. They relieved a pickup truck of its tools and a nosy neighbor called 911.

At the district station, they pulled off their belts and pulled out their laces. They emptied their pockets of combs, cigarettes, matchbooks. They pressed their fingers onto the ink pad, frowned for the camera, and joined the rest of the day’s catch in a frigid lockup. They curled up on a metal bench or a concrete floor and waited—midnight, four in the morning, noon—while computers checked their prints for outstanding warrants. They were treated to a baloney-on-white and coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Those with misdemeanor charges and no warrants were given a court date and released. The others were cuffed wrist to wrist and loaded into the large police wagon that swung by the station. The chain of prisoners in the wagon lengthened as the driver made pickups at other stations. The wagon bumped along toward the courthouse at 26th and California.

The Cook County Criminal Courthouse—the biggest and busiest felony courthouse in the nation—sits in a Mexican neighborhood on Chicago’s southwest side. It’s a boxy limestone structure, seven stories high and seven decades old, with Doric columns, Latin phrases carved into the limestone, and eight sculpted figures above the columns, representing law, justice, liberty, truth, might, love, wisdom, and peace. None of them is visible from the back of a police wagon.

A paunchy, balding white officer is behind the wheel of the first wagon to dip down a ramp and dock at the rear door this evening. He opens the wagon’s tail, and a chain of fifteen men, a dozen black and three white, winds its way out. The prisoners are rumpled and rank–the wagon-tossed, wretched refuse of a major American city, arrested on Martin Luther King Day. The driver follows the prisoners to the door, balancing over one shoulder a clear bag holding fifteen smaller clear bags that contain keys, combs, lip salve, cigarettes, lighters, beepers, eyeglasses, belts, shoelaces. In his other hand is a sheaf of arrest reports and rap sheets.

A navy-shirted sheriff ’s deputy slides open the barred door, and the prisoners file into the courthouse basement. About fifteen hundred prisoners pass through this doorway weekly on their way to a bond hearing—78,000 men and women a year accused of violating the peace and dignity of the State of Illinois.

In thirty courtrooms on floors two through seven, plea deals are fashioned and hearings and trials conducted every weekday. But for most defendants, the first glimpse of the interior of the courthouse is of this cellar.

The cellar holds several dank chambers with cinder-block walls and metal benches bolted to concrete floors. The grimy walls have been decorated here and there by deputies who had a black marker or a tube of Preparation H and time on their hands. WELCOME TO COUNTY—GET SERVED WITH A SMILE reads the script next to a horned and goateed grinning devil on a wall near the entrance. Other greetings: THIS WAY TO THE DANCE, and HEAD FIRST—HIT HERE, and YOU WON'T BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS.

Later tonight the prisoners will be escorted through a tunnel to the quivering elevator that will carry them up to Courtroom 100 for their bond hearings. At evening’s end the lucky prisoners who can make bond or who get an “I-bond” (a no-money-down individual-recognizance bond) will walk out of the courthouse’s front door. The rest of the prisoners—about two-thirds of them, if this is a typical night—will ride the elevator back downstairs and march through a longer tunnel to jail.

“Okay, fifteen desperate criminals,” the paunchy officer tells the deputy at the entrance, one of twenty deputies working in the basement this evening. Yawning, the officer hands over the property bag and the paperwork.

The prisoners are directed to a bench in a bullpen down the hall, where they stand as they’re told—silently, backs of their legs against the edge of the bench. A second police officer is already at the door, dropping off three bleary-eyed black women. A deputy points them to a nearby bench. They step warily past Blackjack, a German shepherd, and Harley, a Rottweiler, the dogs straining toward them, tugging on the leashes gripped by two deputies.

Meanwhile a deputy in the bullpen at the end of the hall makes his way down the line of fifteen men, unlocking and collecting the handcuffs for the first wagon driver.

“When the cuffs come off, your hands go behind your back,” snaps the bull-necked, light-skinned African American deputy who’s got the paperwork now. “All right, when you hear your last name, tell me your first name. Powell.”

“Here.”

Bullneck stalks over to Powell, a frail black youth in a neon-orange windbreaker. “Is your first name Here, motherfucker?” the deputy hollers in the startled youth’s face.

The prisoners make it through the rest of roll call flawlessly, and then Bullneck directs them to sit. Another wagon arrives, and ten more disheveled males join the first fifteen in the back room. After they’re uncuffed and checked in and have taken their seats on one of the benches that line three sides of the chamber, Bullneck welcomes them all to 26th Street.

“You don’t scare me,” he tells them. “You don’t intimidate me. And you sure fucking don’t impress me.” He informs the prisoners that they’ll be going to bond court, and that after that they’ll be headed home or to jail. But there’s a third place they can end up if they don’t follow the rules here, Bullneck warns—the jail hospital.

The rules are simple and not to be questioned, he says—no food, no phone calls, no smoking. “I don’t care if you haven’t eaten all week or made a phone call all day. It’s not my problem.” And the cardinal rule: in the hallways, on the elevator, in the courtroom upstairs, a prisoner’s hands must remain behind his back. “We don’t know you. We don’t know what the fuck is on your mind. You come out with your hands swinging, you’re gonna get dropped,” Bullneck says. “If you forget every other rule I tell you, don’t forget the hands-behind-the-back rule.”

Bullneck surveys his mute, expressionless subjects.

“Does everybody understand the fucking rules?”

A handful of mumbled yessirs.

“Let me hear that again.”

“Yes sir!”

Next Bullneck announces “freebie time,” inviting the prisoners to surrender any drugs they’ve managed to retain despite earlier searches by Chicago police. Nobody gets charged for what they give up now, he promises. But those who think they can sneak something by the deputies should know that Blackjack and Harley will be along presently. And if those dogs sniff a rock, a pinch of blow, or a roach, “you’re gonna get bit, and you’re gonna get charged.” As usual, no one takes advantage of freebie time.

Now Bullneck has the men remove their coats and jackets and toss them onto the floor in the middle of the room. Four deputies wearing black gloves work through the heap of sports team jackets and Salvation Army specials, exploring pockets and kneading collars and waistbands. Meanwhile Bullneck directs the prisoners to pull off their laceless sneakers or workboots, tear out any liners, and hold the shoes upside down by the toes, arms outstretched. The men dutifully comply, and in a moment a ring of stocking-footed men are wordlessly offering up their soles to him.

“And when I tell you to, don’t bang ’em like a buncha pussies,” Bullneck says. “Bang ’em so anything inside falls out.” He studies the group; all eyes are on him.

“Now—bang ’em!”

A host of arms are immediately pumping, beating those shoes and boots together, admirably unpussylike, the stampede echoing off the walls for a quarter of a minute, until Bullneck raises a hand. Nothing but lint has fallen to the concrete.

Next he has the men peel off their socks, extend their legs in front of them, and shake their socks while wiggling their toes. A yeasty odor rises in the room.

“All right, everybody stand up!” Bullneck bellows. “Turn around, grab some wall!” The four gloved deputies commence the pat-downs. It’s not a penetrating search: anyone willing to tuck a cocaine rock up his butt will get away with it for now, but those who end up going to jail had better smoke up that rock in the jail bullpens before the strip-search there. Blackjack and Harley are mainly showpieces, Bullneck’s warning about the dogs’ impending sniff-search an empty threat. The deputies are checking for weapons now more than drugs. They don’t trust the pat-downs of Chicago’s finest; prisoners have arrived here with knives in their pockets, the deputies claim. (Chicago cops “couldn’t find their ass with both hands,” one deputy says.)

A skinny Hispanic man awaiting his search foolishly peeks over his shoulder. The boss here tonight, the white-shirted Sergeant London Thomas, who’s been watching the pat-downs from just outside the bullpen, is at the skinny man’s side in an instant. “What the fuck’re you staring at me for?” Thomas roars in the man’s ear. “Face the fucking wall!

“Everybody should be staring at the wall,” Thomas growls. “Ain’t nothing behind you but an ass-kicking."

“This guy’s got a ring on that don’t come off,” a deputy says. “Guess we’ll just have to lop off a finger.”

“What’s with you?” asks another deputy, of the trembling middle-aged man he’s searching.

“I have MS,” the man mumbles.

“Oh, he has PMS,” the deputy announces, to his comrades’ snickers.

There’s a method to the deputies’ malice, Sergeant Thomas says later: it’s to let the prisoners know immediately who’s in charge in the courthouse. “Control is something we cannot relinquish,” the sergeant says. “If we did that, we’d be fucked up right away. Extremely.” The twenty or so deputies who work a bond court shift are watching at least sixty and sometimes more than a hundred prisoners. The deputies carry no weapons, to eliminate the risk of a prisoner seizing one. “We’re armed with gloves, handcuffs, and attitude,” Thomas says.

But the deputies’ tone also expresses their sentiments about the prisoners. Those marched into the basement are cloaked in the presumption of innocence—in theory. The prevailing wisdom down here, however, is: if they’re so innocent, why’d they arrive in handcuffs?

“We get the dregs of humanity here,” says Lieutenant John Hopkins, tonight’s watch commander in the courthouse. “If these people moved in next door to you, your lawn would die.”

Hopkins believes in the golden rule. Treat the prisoners respectfully, he instructs his deputies, and don’t get rough if you’re not provoked. But some of his deputies are a little too eager to do unto others, he concedes, believing “that the only justice is at the end of a good right cross.” Hopkins doesn’t spend much time in the basement, allowing Sergeant Thomas to run the show down here most evenings. Hopkins says an occupational hazard of his job as watch commander is “the stiff neck you can get from looking the other way.”

Sergeant Thomas, a tall, muscular African American, says the deputies threaten violence a lot more than they deliver it. Every now and then, though, certain prisoners require “a little—positive reinforcement,” he says with a chuckle.

When the deputies have finished their pat-downs and the prisoners have been allowed to retrieve their coats from the pile, Thomas strides to the center of the group—the head coach with the final pregame chat, now that his assistant has warmed up the team. “I want to have a nice, quiet night,” he tells the prisoners. “I want to get done, have a drink, and go home. Gentlemen, your situation’s fucked up enough as it is. You don’t need it any more fucked up.”

It’s time to move these first twenty-five men to a bullpen around the corner to make room for another batch at the door. Bullneck instructs his prisoners to follow another deputy down the hall–single file, hands behind their backs, of course. Shoves and shouts from Bullneck and his colleagues chase the line of prisoners on their way: “Get the fuck going!” “Keep moving, dickhead!”

A different deputy gives the welcoming speech to the second bedraggled collection, reminding these men “what a fucked-up bunch of smelly motherfuckers” they are. There’s never a lack of volunteers among the deputies for the honor of delivering the welcoming talk, with each succeeding speaker trying to outbadass the last one. “Some of ’em get off on it more than others,” Sergeant Thomas says.

A prisoner at the entrance complains of dizziness. He fell and hit his head shortly before his arrest, he tells Thomas. Thomas surveys the man’s head for cuts or swelling, finds none. Almost every night the sergeant has to do a diagnosis such as this. Anyone who insists he needs medical care will be taken to nearby St. Anthony Hospital–Holy Tony’s, as the deputies call it. But Thomas discourages the trips when he’s not convinced of the need. He knows some of the prisoners are merely trying to postpone their date with jail. The regulations require two deputies to accompany each prisoner who goes to the hospital, so Thomas would be shorthanded fast if he granted every request. There’s paperwork involved as well. The prisoners aren’t likely to expire in court, and in a couple of hours they’ll either be the jail hospital’s concern or, if they bond out, not the county’s problem at all. Thus Thomas is often like the detective who persuades a suspect he doesn’t really need a lawyer. For tonight’s dizzy prisoner, he invokes one of his standard fabrications: “I can send you to the hospital if you want. But the officer who drove you here? He’s got to drive you to the hospital. And then you got to ride all the way back here with him.” Dizzy or not, the prisoner gets Thomas’s hint about the peril of being alone in the custody of an aggravated cop, and he decides to forgo medical aid.

The initial group of prisoners is occupying one of three bullpens down another hallway. The benches are full, the overflow on the floor. Soon the second group comes marching single file down the corridor and fills the middle bullpen. Thomas tells everybody that standing isn’t allowed. Fights in the bullpens were common when Thomas began working bond court three years ago—there were more “gangbangers” (gang members) being arrested then, he says. The fights led to the rule against standing, the idea being that it’s harder to throw a punch while sitting. The prohibition probably isn’t needed anymore, Thomas says, because the prisoners these days are mostly a docile bunch of addicts and small-time dealers. But rules are rules, and so when Thomas spots a man standing in bullpen two, he strides immediately over to him and booms, “What the fuck you doing standing in my bullpen? Do I have to chain you to the floor to get you to sit down?” The man quickly drops to the floor.

When more prisoners come down the hall, Thomas splits them between bullpens one and two, jamming those chambers, the men shoulder to shoulder on the benches and the floor. The female prisoners are being held in an anteroom near the basement entrance. Thomas wishes he could put some of the men in bullpen three, but it’s occupied by the juveniles—the kiddie criminals, as the deputies call them. Most juveniles charged with delinquency are tried at the juvenile court two miles northeast of here. But thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds facing adult charges—murder, rape, armed robbery, drug dealing near a school—are bused here from the detention center next to the juvenile court for their court dates. A dozen of them who had court appearances here earlier today are on the benches of bullpen three, chatting quietly, waiting for the bus to return them to the detention center. The bus, as usual, is late. Thomas will be happier when the juveniles are gone, not just because it’ll free up another bullpen but also because of what pests the kiddie criminals can be, with their godawful whining. “It’s ‘What time’s the bus coming?’” Thomas says. “‘Can I get something to eat?’”

Thomas calls his adult prisoners out to the hallway one at a time and with a black marker prints a three-digit number on the back of each prisoner’s hand, and the same number on each prisoner’s property bag. Many of the prisoners already have a number scrawled on one arm, a memento from the district station. Those who end up going to jail tonight will get further markings on their hands or arms as they’re assigned to a division, a tier, and a cell. The bullpens are quiet while Thomas does his numbering. Some of the prisoners are dozing; others are studying the floor or the back of the head of the prisoner in front of them. Most of the adult prisoners have been through this before, and those who haven’t catch on quickly, understanding that remaining silent is not a right now but an expectation.

There’s always a slow learner, however. Tonight it’s a balding white man, who hails a deputy passing in the hallway, telling him he’s got a question. Thomas overhears, drops the hand of the prisoner he’s numbering, rushes into the bullpen, and sticks his nose menacingly in the balding man’s ruddy face: “Excuse me—why am I about to beat the piss outta you?” The prisoner averts his eyes and says nothing more. Thomas returns to the hallway.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Steve Bogira's book takes us into the heart of America's criminal justice system. Courtroom 302 is the story of one year in one courtroom in Chicago's Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country." We see the system through the eyes of the men and women who experience it, not only in the courtroom but in the lockup, the jury room, the judge's chambers, the spectators' gallery.

FROM THE CRITICS

Ted Conover - The New York Times

Steve Bogira, for years a reporter for The Chicago Reader, burrows into the machine that processes thousands of citizens a year, most of them poor, African-American and involved with drugs. His intuition was that the goings-on in the old limestone courthouse on 26th Street, however banal-seeming, might hide sprawling human dramas. And by focusing on something small -- the cases coming before one judge, in a single courtroom -- he gets a handle on something large and hard to make sense of: the American way of criminal justice.

Publishers Weekly

Chicago-based journalist Bogira's first book is an outstanding journey inside the American criminal justice system that nicely complements last year's Blue Blood, Edward Conlon's inside look at the life of a big-city cop. Like that instant classic, this book-centered on the Cook County Criminal Courthouse, "the biggest and busiest felony courthouse in the nation"-punctures the popular myths engendered by TV shows like Law and Order to provide a balanced view of the realities of the day-to-day, assembly-line grind that marks so much of the process from arrest to final disposition. The author's ability to gain the trust of so many different participants in the grim drama-judges, public defenders, prosecutors, court officers, prison guards and many defendants-is remarkable, and he often comes close to presenting a more complete picture of the truth of a particular crime than emerge in court in the or in the few cases that actually go to trial. Despite this access, Bogira does not gild the people he describes; even Judge Daniel Locallo, the book's central figure-whose courtroom witnesses racial violence, pathetic thievery, the abused and the mentally incompetent, and who, on balance emerges positively-is portrayed warts and all. The brilliance of Bogira's insights will lead many to hope that he will follow this debut with proposals to cure the many ills he has diagnosed. Agent, David Black. (Mar. 24) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews