This is a biography of the early years of a somewhat successful legal career. It lacks the aphrodisiac of star quality, but what it provides is closer to common ground, and in that sense more valuable. Within these pages I have portrayed my sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating coming of age as a trial lawyer in post mid-century Nashville, Tennessee.

There is plenty of drama, much ridiculousness, and most of all an abiding sense of humanity, created by the collision of an earnest, young lawyer on the lower rungs of the American System of Justice with the system itself. The comedy,...