Acclaimed novelist Carroll Dale Short turns his talents toward creative nonfiction in The People's Lawyer, the biography of local personality and national figure Julian McPhillips Jr.--a man as paradoxical as the South in which he lives. The story follows McPhillips's journey from his childhood in tranquil Cullman, Alabama, to his athletic career and studies at Princeton, and on to an activist era at Columbia Law School. Recounting the one-time...