Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 14, 1995 TAG: 9508140116
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Merrill gave it a reading. It passed his exacting scrutiny.
"I knew if the manuscript could survive Dick Merrill's very precise eyes, then it could survive anybody," Howard recalls.
Howard's book, "The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America," has become a mega-best-seller: It has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 26 weeks and is in now its 17th printing, with 300,000 copies in print.
Howard spent much of his boyhood in Whitesburg, Ky., just across the border from Virginia. He spent summers at his Aunt Polly's farm in Ruffin, N.C., not far from Danville.
He earned his undergraduate degree from Yale, worked a few years in New York, and then enrolled at the UVa Law School, class of 1974.
He says the lessons he learned at UVa helped him with his book.
Unlike many Eastern law schools, Howard said, UVa emphasized real-world concerns over academic forays into the twists and turns of logic.
UVa professors "valued practical solutions and common sense."
He got the idea for his book a few years ago during an ill-fated run for City Council in New York, where he's a founding partner in a law firm.
The poor people he talked with on the street on the Lower East Side had the same criticisms of government as his corporate clients: It was unresponsive and never did the sensible thing.
He spent 2 1/2 years writing his book, didn't like what he'd produced - it was too much a "pounding-on-the-table" harangue - and threw the typed manuscript in the trash. He started from scratch, writing it out in longhand. In a few months, he'd produced a short book that, he hopes, lets readers lean back and laugh a little at the stupidity of government.
For all the attention he's earned, Howard seems proudest of a recent development: He learned Friday a graffiti artist is writing a different quotation from his book each day on a Harlem building.
"With attribution," Howard says. "Apparently it says, 'Phil Howard, The Death of Common Sense' at the bottom."
by CNB