The Far Side of the Moon: Trials of My Father

by Clive Stafford Smith

'[A] vivid, inquiring memoir... A properly soul-searching book' - Tim Adams, ObserverAs one of our leading campaigners for justice, human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has spent a lifetime getting to know his clients - from detainees in Guantánamo Bay to prisoners facing execution on Death Row - and finding out, in his own words, 'what makes them tick'.But for much of his life, closer to home, there was a man whose mind remained off his own father. It was only years after Dick's death, when Clive inherited more than 3,000 of his letters, that he could finally take a breath and start to piece together the obsessive personality behind them.In The Far Side of the Moon, Stafford Smith seeks the broad conversation about mental illness that was not accessible in his earlier years, reflecting on his father's fragmented life together with that of Larry Lonchar, a client who also struggled with severe depression, and whose fate continues to preoccupy him.Following the critically acclaimed Injustice, this courageous new book is an indictment of the failures in our social and justice systems, a meditation on privilege and its consequences, and an intimate exploration of how the mind's hinterlands can impact a family and shape a life.

Genres: Nonfiction

352 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 19, 2022

About the author

Clive Stafford Smith OBE is a British, formerly US-based lawyer specializing in civil rights and the death penalty in the United States. He is also the founder and Director of Reprieve, a human rights not-for-profit organization. To date, Clive has helped secure the release of 65 prisoners from Guantánamo Bay (including every British prisoner) and still acts for 15 more. More recently, Clive has turned a strategic eye to the other secret detention sites, including Bagram in Afghanistan and the British island of Diego Garcia. In 2000 he was awarded an OBE for ‘humanitarian services’, and has since received numerous honours and awards. His book BAD MEN: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons was published by Phoenix in 2008.

Reviews

[Carolyn Drake · Rating 3 out of 5]

This intriguing memoir sees campaigning lawyer Clive Stafford Smith lay bare his own personality as he looks back on the influence of two contrasting yet similar men in his life: his father, Dick Stafford Smith; and Larry Lonchar, a death row inmate he battled to save from the electric chair. The author recognises how the abuse and abandonment he felt at the hands of his manic-depressive father resulted in him closing off his emotions as an early age as a safety mechanism. His escape to America and his shunning of high-paid corporate law in favour of anti-death penalty activism was a direct result, but Lonchar's case caused him to question whether he was making his client's life worse by seeking to save his life against his wishes.