The character named Anonymous Lawyer is really a lawyer. He is a law partner in some prestigious law firm, hoping and scheming to one day be promoted as Chairman. One day, with the help of Anonymous Niece, he decides to write a blog. Just for fun. He figures he will delete it when he loses interest, which he expects to happen soon.
Anonymous Lawyer is a fiction book that is written in the form of a blog and some emails. It is not the first book written in this format, and it won’t be the last. I still think of this as a new format, though.
The text in the book looks like the font in a real blog, and even has titles and time stamps on the end. The emails have who it is to and who it is from, and look exactly like you would expect an email to look. The font for the emails is different from the font in the blog post. Reading this book feels like you are reading someone’s blog on the internet.
The blog takes on a life of its own. At first, he is just venting a bit about things that annoy him at work. He quickly moves on to describing day to day events that happen with his job, the people he works with, and his family. In the blog, he writes exactly what he thinks about everything. He is sarcastic, jaded, and exactly as self-important as we expect big lawyers to be. The writing is wonderful!
Soon, Anonymous Lawyer becomes a bit worried. Are other people reading his blog? Will he be found out? He decides to set up an email address for the blog, and starts getting comments.
At first, he gets a lot of email from lawyers around the country who are convinced that they know who Anonymous Lawyer really is. They are certain that he’s the guy in the next office who is typing on his laptop right now. They are sure he’s the lawyer that made their life a living hell when they were a summer intern. They are convinced that they work in the same law firm as Anonymous Lawyer because their law firm just took the interns to the beach the other day, too. All are wrong.
Eventually, someone who Anonymous Lawyer works with discovers his blog. How did he do it? Anonymous Lawyer thought he was being careful about keeping things anonymous. He never mentioned the name of his law firm. He re-named his coworkers things like: Tax Guy, The Jerk, or The One Wants To Be Partner. His own family was called Anonymous Wife, Anonymous Daughter, and Anonymous Son.
Anonymous Lawyer learns that you cannot truly be anonymous on the internet indefinitely. As you might expect, Anonymous Lawyer becomes paranoid. He’s terrified that what he wrote in his blog will be used against him. The moral of the story is: Be careful what you blog! This is especially true if what you blog includes mean and nasty comments that can come back to bite you.
This book review of Anonymous Lawyer – Jeremy Blachman is a post written by Jen Thorpe on Book of Jen and is not allowed to be copied to other sites.
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