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: Lawbeat

Note to Oregon pol: Don't ask Enron reporter for a blurb

By Mark Obbie

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John Kroger, a candidate in next week's Democratic primary for Oregon attorney general, has just published a memoir, Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves. Willamette Week reviewer Matt Buckingham called it "a thoughtful, compulsively readable assessment of the American justice system’s struggles with the greatest social evils of our time." Buckingham goes on to write, "Kroger faces a politically experienced, well-qualified opponent in next week’s election for state attorney general, but win or lose he may be the publishing industry’s next Vincent Bugliosi." At Powell's Books, there's a flood of blurbs for Kroger's book: "mesmerizing.... spellbinding ... engrossing ... straightforward and truthful ... suspenseful and enlightening ... extraordinarily intimate account ... " Meanwhile, Legal Trade blogger Mary Flood has this to say about Kroger's "self-congratulatory" book, which she calls a work of "stunning hubris":

The four somewhat conflicted chapters on Enron talk alternately about his prowess, his lack of knowledge, how careful prosecutors were, how ruthless prosecutors were, how terrific his case against the Enron broadband executives was and how it hasn't been successful in court. . . . Should this ex-prosecutor and wanna-be Oregon AG have thought twice before publishing this book, or at least the Enron chapters?

Guess which writer covered the Enron case as a reporter? That would be Flood, whose hard-charging coverage of the Enron scandal for the Houston Chronicle and her decades as a legal reporter make her nobody's fool. It's a good thing for Kroger that he's running for office a long way from Houston.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on May 16, 2008 (boomark / email).