Oh What a Mighty Falling Off is Here!

The recent scandal that brought down New York Governor Eliot Spitzer awakened memories of another precipitous fall, that of New York State Chief Judge Sol Wachtler. Like Spitzer, Wachtler was a mighty New York personage whose high office and reputation for rectitude stood in glaring contrast to the almost unimaginably bizarre behavior that wrecked a career many said was on a track for Governor of New York or Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

The obvious question is, How can men holding august office lose their wits so thoroughly? Yet, when we look closely at stories like Wachtler's, Spitzer's or Bill Clinton's, we see that the collapse of their careers began with the most trivial of temptations - one drink too many, one coquettish glance, one indulgence of a minor vice. Who of us is so far from yielding to similar temptations that we can honestly say we would never set our feet on the same slippery path to self-destruction?

That's a question that you will certainly ask when you read Wachtler's memoir, After the Madness.

The exposure of a public figure is never pretty, but Wachtler's was particularly humiliating. His arrest, conviction and incarceration for harassing his longtime lover precipitated a media feeding frenzy. And then he had to serve time with men he himself had judged from the highest legal chair in the state.

With unflinching honesty, Wachtler draws upon his unique experience of living life on both sides of the bench to paint a chilling portrait of prison life interwoven with a no-holds-barred analysis of the shortcomings of the American legal justice system.

No less a commentator than Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities, wrote, "After The Madness is the riveting prison diary of one of the most powerful judges in America, a sure bet to succeed Mario Cuomo as governor of New York in 1995, who fell abruptly into the abyss of the criminal justice system, landing in 'the hole' in two federal prisons, and emerging from the lower depths at last to bring back fascinating observations about crime and punishment, many of them startling, some of them bitterly funny."

- Richard Curtis