The Marble and the Sculptor
A few months* ago, Keith Lee, who blogs at Associate's Mind, was kind enough to send me a review copy of his book titled "The Marble and the Sculptor". The book is a survival guide of sorts for newly minted lawyers, tackling a wide range of topics such as how to dress, whether networking should play a role in your daily grind, and tips on how to improve your writing. Even though I'm not a just-out-of-law-school lawyer, and I have an ambivalent relationship to self help books, I thought it was an enjoyable and worthwhile read. It was well put together, organized, and mixed anecdotes with practical tips. Will it provide you a silver bullet to use against the law practice beast? Probably not. Will it reaffirm and reinforce concepts that you probably know intuitively and perhaps offer one set of responses to those in doubt about the practical course of action? Yes.
In a sense, the book is somewhat self illustrative of the concepts Keith talks about. It must have taken a chunk of time to germinate the idea, get with a publisher, actually write and now market the book. It was obvious he took a professional approach to these tasks, rather then approaching it as some sort of hobby that could have just languished on the vine.
The content itself is a mix of parables, examples, and just nuts and bolts on particular topics. Again, none of it is a silver bullet (and of course one aspect of his point is that no such silver bullet exists), but it was generally useful stuff. I recommend the book to lawyers young and for that matter old.
[FWIW, a couple of years ago Keith wrote what is to this day one of my favorite posts about Twitter: "The Anticipation of Being Re-Tweeted".]
* I feel guilty about the timing of this post. I get the sense that when you get a review copy you're supposed to crank through it and publish a post so the publisher can take advantage of it in marketing the book. For whatever reason I did not crank out the review in a timely fashion.
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