Rating: 
Summary: Unrealistic with great liberties on how legal system works
Review: Writing style is basic at best. Developoment of characters is flawed and uninteresting. The author uses great liberties in describing how our legal system is applied in a jury situation and some of it is actually inaccurate. Book does not create much suspense and many of the plots are given away by his use of present tense rather than past tense when describing the alleged murders of the Prandus family. The ending leaves you hanging and does not really address the issue of revenge murder. The book was a waste of money and the author should stick to teaching what he thinks the law is at Harvard.
Rating:
Summary: Awful, Corrupt, Sick
Review: This book asks the question: "Is it right to commit unspeakable acts on innocent family members of criminals?" The answer is of course "no." It's how one bad acts never ends and it's not even interesting. It's just nonsense. But in Dershowitz warped world anything goes. This guy is dangerous. What can you expect from the man who defended OJ?
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent story, but it was too short.
Review: Although I like the style of the book, it becomes clear very early that the author needed to write a longer book to help develop the characters fully (he can not assume that everyone has read "The Advocate's Devil"). In addition, the ending is somewhat disjointed and unbelievable. If the author had a point to make (and I'm sure he did) he didn't make it. We should have guilty or innocent and let the author explain the consequences of both scenarios to the readers' satisfaction--it would have taken another book. But on the other hand, it was an okay effort.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling but wanted more about Ringel (Dershowitz?)
Review: This is one book most people will not be able to put down.My only big disappointment about the book is that I wanted to know more about Abe Ringel. I wanted to hear more about this thoughts. I wanted to read more about his legal maneuvering. Yes, I also wanted to figure out whether he was Alan Dershowitz saying that the professor really wants to only take on innocent clients.
Rating: 
Summary: education in novel form
Review: The "Dersh" once again shows his multi faceted talent in using the novel form to educate the reader in philosophy, ethics, morality, law and judaism. An enjoyable quick read,that leaves you with new insights into the victim's dillema-- Forget and be miserable,or remember and be miserable. The imaginative ending is a relief and catharsis for all.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought provoking and moving
Review: This book makes you FEEL as well as think about an extremely disturbing moral and legal dilemma. It tempts readers to sympathize, if only for a moment and if only at a very human level, with the desire for a terrible act of revenge against a former Nazi butcher, including the death of innocent family members. It then turns around and invites the reader to sympathize, if only for a moment and at a very human level, with the desire for vengeance by the son of the former Nazi butcher. Finally, it forces readers to decide what kind of punishment the law itself is entitled to impose. The most "annoying" thing about the book is that it NEVER oversimplifies, on either legal or moral issues. It will really engage readers who are not satisfied with pat solutions, and are willing to learn something about themselves from their own reactions to a very suspenseful told story.
Rating:
Summary: Dershowitz surprised me
Review: I was pleasantly surprised by Dershowitzs' writing in this book. The story was good and actually somewhat surprising at the end. The legal stuff was interesting for a non-lawyer like myself and the holocaust and Jewish cultural stuff was also very interesting for a non-Jew like myself. The first 2/3rds of the book was somewhat predictably but the ending was surprising, I enjoyed the pop culture references and was somewhat surprised that Dershowitz was that much into popculture. I was also surprised that Dershowitz was able to so easily and thoroughly poke fun at defense attorneys and outline their flaws so eloquently being that he is one of the premiere defense attorneys in the country. I guess that I didnt find the plot that thought provoking, the moral issues actually seem pretty cut and dry to me. The act of revenge that they came up with was quite brilliant but that they could do it so quickly and with so few accomplisses was somewhat hard to believe. Over all an enjoyable and light read.
Rating:
Summary: RESPONSE TO N.Y. OBSERVER REVIEW
Review: Alan Dershowitz's "Just Revenge" is a masterfully crafted story that challanges its readers to question their most basic instincts and ethics. The issues, dilemmas and solutions are presented through a thrilling and haunting story that keeps you from putting this book down, while at all times trying to put yourself in the shoes of the main character "Max Menuchen". Upon completeing this first-rate novel I was left compelled to ask myself who, at the NY Observer, chose to write a reveiw, and just what book had they actually read. Not only does the NY Observer reviewer totally miss the mark, but they completely betray their ignorance by trying to imply plagerized material from the wonderful Elie Wiesel book "Night". After re-reading "Night" I could find no similarity in the scenes referred to by the Observer and was left to wonder if this reviewer had some other agenda in what was nothing more than an outrageous attempt to slander Mr. Dershowitz. In fact, on the rear jacket of "Just Revenge", Elie Wiesel himself gives the book a glowing endorsement. Read this book, it will keep you talking and asking questions of yourself for some time.
Rating:
Summary: Immensely worthwhile!
Review: Alan Dershowitz doesn't know me of course, but he and I have had a love-hate relationship for years. I was furious with him over the OJ case, and annoyed as all get out with his vocal defense of Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal. Yet, never could I turn him off when he'd appear on one of the legal talk shows. His mind is phenomenal...no one could ever dispute the man's intellect and the fact that he has a moral view, whether or not you agree with his conclusions. It's always wise to listen to the man. His first novel, The Advocate's Devil, was very clever and largely entertaining. Just Revenge brings back the character of defense attorney Abe Ringel, in a story that is as utterly moving as it is thought-provoking. Clearly Abe Ringel is the best person inside Alan Dershowitz; the one he probably thinks he really is, and the one I'd like to hope is the real Alan Dershowitz. I think the author completely accomplished his goal of examining the deepest roots of revenge and justice. What questions this book raises! Anyone who likes to think should grab this book and enjoy it as the treasure it is. I'd enjoy hearing from other readers who shared my appreciation for the issues brought up in this moving novel.
Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking and almost unimaginable vulgarity
Review: Having written The Vanishing American Jew: In Search for Jewish Identity for the Next Century and that classic of self-celebration, Chutzpah, Mr. Dershowitz is himself something of a soi-disant expert on Jewish culture. Here he gives us a courtroom melodrama in which Abe Ringel-the hero of a previous Dershowitz thriller and, one can't help thinking, a stand-in for the author-gets the chance to try his dream case. His friend Max Menuchen, an aged, dignified, sympathetic Holocaust survivor, has learned that the Lithuanian officer who ordered the massacre of his family is alive in America. The old man concocts an elaborate revenge scheme, and when Max is accused of engineering the Lithuanian's death, Abe agrees to defend him. It's difficult, really, to fully describe just how dreadful the novel is. Unable to distinguish between dialogue and exposition, Mr. Dershowitz treats us to passages like the following, in which Max relates a childhood memory: "'We must have looked strange,' Max said with a warm smile as he remembered the scene. 'A portly old man with a flowing white beard and a fur hat, crawling around a dark attic, while his 18-year-old grandson, wearing a black suit and a yarmulke, with curly sidelocks and the beginning of a never-shaved beard, held a flickering candle.'" With no apparent interest in narrative verisimilitude or psychological credibility, he muddles up dramatic moments like this one: "'I could never forget your eyes!' Max bellowed as his hand, with a will of its own, smashed against Prandus' face.... Prandus cringed in fear, not from the force of the blow, but from Max's words. As he watched the powerful man's face twitch, Max heard King Lear's terrible words: 'Tremble, thou wretch, that hast within thee undivulged crimes unwhipped of justice ...'" But the novel's literary flaws are the least of it. What's galling is the righteousness with which Mr. Dershowitz advances his shaky moral agenda, with its explicit and disturbing endorsement of vigilante justice. ("My hope is that I have written a book that may lead a few people to better understand and empathize with the victims of the worst crime ever perpetrated by one group of human beings on another." The uses to which he puts the Holocaust are appalling; the mass murder that Max recalls seems not just generic but, detail for detail, suspiciously reminiscent of a similar scene in Night, by Elie Wiesel. In Just Revenge, American-Jewish culture has been brought to new and previously unplumbed depths by Mr. Dershowitz's egregious attempt to reduce the Holocaust to a bad lawyer joke.
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