Paul Barrett, author of the well-timed book, “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun,” spoke to the Georgia Bar, Media and Judiciary Conference Saturday, and he offered his thoughts on the current national conversation about firearms.

It’s important to note that Barrett, an editor at Bloomberg Businessweek and a law professor, has done his best to approach Glock in particular, and guns in general,  with the objectivity of a reporter, not a partisan.  His meticulously reported book explains the success of the Glock pistol, which has attained near-iconic status in America after its humble beginnings in the workshop of an Austrian tinkerer.

Part of the success of the Glock is its superior design, but it also hit the market at the right time, and Barrett had to explore America’s evolving attitudes toward firearms to explain Glock’s trajectory.  In the process of researching the book, he became an astute student of firearms’ place in American life.

Yes, Barrett works for that Bloomberg, and Barrett is a gun owner and recreational shooter, and a member of the NRA, for, as he says, “research purposes.”

Here are some of the observations he offered in an hour and a half talk with CNN’s Jessica Thill over lunch at the Georgia Bar.

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Simon & Shuster has just released the complete works of Richard M. Nixon as e-books, in honor of his 100th birthday today. Nixon was a prolific writer and several of his 10 works were best-sellers. Among the titles being released are RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon; No More Vietnams; In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat and Renewal.

“Nixon’s books were best sellers because they offered important views and commentary on the major events which shaped our country and the world. It is clear that Richard Nixon is now being studied and appreciated more and more on the basis of his entire 48 years in the public square,” said the president of the Richard Nixon Foundation, Sandy Quinn via Mediabistro. Nixon, a Duke University law school graduate, was a lawyer with the Mudge Rose firm in New York in the years between serving and vice president and president.

Most of the books cost $13.99 and are available from the Simon & Shuster website or Amazon.com. Robert C. Odle Jr. of Weil, Gotshal & Manges negotiated the deal on behalf of The Richard Nixon Foundation.

The Atlantic has published an absorbing Nixon remembrance on its website, The Operatic Life of Richard Nixon, to mark his 100th birthday. The author, John Aloysius Farrell, is writing a book on the 37th president.

Robert Thompson, the lawyer a client compared to Robin Hood for his foreclosure fighting crusades detailed in a June 19 Daily Report story, shared titles of some of the books he’s found helpful in understanding the financial crisis:

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense – The Inside Story of the collapse of Lehman Brothers
By Lawrence G. McDonald & Patrick Robinson

All the Devils are Here
By Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera

A History of the Federal Reserve
By Allan H. Meltzer

Banking and Financial Institutions Law in a nut shell
By William A. Lovett

The Big Short
By Michael Lewis

Biography of a Bank- The Story of Bank of America
By Marquis James & Bessie R. James

Chasing Goldman Sachs
By Suzanne McGee

Federal Estate and Gift Taxation in a nut shell
By John K. Mcnalty

The Fed
By Martin Mayer

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report
Authorized Edition

Financial Instruments
By David M. Weiss

Fixing the Housing Market
By Franklin Allen, James R. Barth & Glenn Yago

Read more »

Elizabeth Wurtzel, the depressed teen, turned bestselling author, turned lawyer has left litigation powerhouse Boies Schiller & Flexner, according to the celebrity lawyer watchers at Above the Law.

Wurtzel tells David Lat she’s resigning from the firm to “have more time to write.”

Prozac Nation, a memoir of her depressed young adulthood, became a bestseller when Wurtzel published it as a young adult in the 1990s. She followed it up with another memoir, More, Now, Again, and other works, such as Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, before heading for Yale Law School in her late 30s.

Wurtzel has continued to write self-reflective pieces for The Atlantic, Elle and other magazines while at Boies Schiller–where, according to Above the Law, she was personally hired by David Boies after graduating from law school in 2008.

Wurtzel also tells Lat that she is completing her application for New York Bar membership.  She passed the state’s bar exam in 2010 but has not yet become a member of the New York Bar, even though she’s worked for Boies Schiller for several years.

Her departure prompts Lat to wonder whether large law firms are still interested in having lawyer-authors on the payroll. He mentions older, male, high-profile writer-lawyers in the employ of such firms, such as Scott Turow at SNR Denton in Chicago and Louis Begley at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York.

The website of Weissmann Zucker Euster Morochnik says partner Scott Zucker “specializes in business and commercial litigation with an emphasis on dispute resolution in the areas of construction, real estate, employment, landlord-tenant and franchise law.”

He can now add to that list the title of novelist, and, if his book “Chain of Custody” sells well, he can add philanthropist.

Zucker has pledged to donate his profits from the book, available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, to the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University.

Zucker’s publicist provided this summary of the story: “Matt Taggart is a hard working young associate attorney at a prestigious Washington, D.C. litigation firm. He is married with a one-year-old daughter. Matt’s day-to-day life is unremarkable until his father, a U.S. senator, is killed in a small plane crash. Was his father’s death a suicide or a homicide? Assisted by a woman investigator from the National Transportation and Safety Board, Matt begins his quest to learn the cause of his father’s death. During his investigation, Matt finds himself drawn into the corrupt world of defense contractors and the inner workings of the Pentagon. As Matt gets closer to the answer, he must balance the work of this law firm, the ethical dilemmas of defending a large pharmaceutical company in a wrongful death case and his feelings for his wife as he becomes emotionally closer to the woman that is sharing his adventure.”

So many lawyers credit Atticus Finch of “To Kill a Mockingbird” as their inspiration to join the bar that it’s almost a cliché. Yet there is one lawyer in Monroeville, Ala., who truly carries the mantle of Atticus—or, to be more accurate, Amasa Coleman Lee, the father of Nelle Harper Lee, “Mockingbird’s” author.

That would be 100-year-old Alice Finch Lee, Harper Lee’s sister, who still practices law in the firm her father started. Alice Lee is featured prominently in a documentary about her sister aired recently on PBS’ “American Masters” series.

Given that Harper Lee last gave an interview in 1964, Alice Lee’s perspective is important to the film, called “Harper Lee: Hey, Boo.” In it, Alice Lee offers insight into her sister’s friendship and eventual falling out with Truman Capote, the basis for the “Mockingbird” character Dill.

Alice Lee is significantly older than her sister, and her entry on the Alabama Bar website says that she graduated from the Birmingham School of Law and joined the bar in 1943.

Stories on al.com and The Daily Beast have more information about Alice Lee, called “Atticus Finch in a skirt” by a friend in one of the pieces.

The documentary, which tells how the book could not have been written without an act of generosity allowing Harper Lee to quit her job to have time to write, can be seen in its entirety here.

Those searching for just the right gift for the outdoorsman or woman on their holiday shopping list need look no further than The Little Book of Hunting & Fishing Law.

The pocket-sized book regales the reader with tales of hunting and fishing expeditions that ended up in the courts—including a case in which the exploding barrel of a shotgun triggered punitive damages and another where a city was sued after a man hunting on city-owned property shot and killed a jogger.

The small size makes this book just the thing for hunters waiting in a blind with time to kill and anglers waiting for fish to bite. It is the newest addition to an American Bar Association series that includes The Little Green Book of Golf Law and The Little Red Book of Wine Law.

The author, Cecil C. Kuhne III, is, appropriately, an inhabitant of Texas. Kuhne is a business litigator in the Dallas office of Fulbright & Jaworski.

Publicity materials do not say whether Dick Cheney’s accidental shooting in 2006 of his quail hunting partner, Harry Whittington, is included in the 128-page guide. Whittington, incidentally, is also a Texas lawyer.

The Daily Report is now in the book publishing business with three books, written exclusively for Georgia lawyers, scheduled for release before the end of the year:

Library of Georgia Personal Injury Forms
by Fried Rogers Goldberg LLC, edited by Michael L. Goldberg, is at the printer and will be available later this month.

Library of Georgia Family Law Forms
by Kessler & Solomiany LLC, edited by Randall M. Kessler, will be available in August.

Georgia Legal Malpractice Law
by J. Randolph Evans and Shari L. Klevens will be available in November.

But that’s not all. We’re in talks with prospective authors of books for Georgia lawyers, and, toward that, have created a soup-to-nuts website that includes information about our books (with tables of contents and sample content), authors, links to order, links to pitch your book, author and practice-specific events and even a blog,  through which readers can interact with authors and other professionals.