Blog — Around the water cooler

Each week I will highlight a different case or legal happening, and solicit your thoughts on the impact of it in the legal community.

Edward Chupack, senior counsel at Neal Gerber & Eisenberg, spent 10 years writing on his train commutes, in the early mornings, late in evenings, and on weekends.

  The culmination of his hard work is the book, “Silver: My Own Tale As Written by Me with a Goodly Amount of Murder.” Published in February, it tells the story behind legendary character Long John Silver.

“Much of the time was spent writing one line every several months and then I would go on writing jags,” Chupack said. “When I finished the first draft of the book it was a jumble, and so I wrote and rewrote it until I got it right.”

Why write about John Silver?

“I’m a child of a Holocaust survivor,” he said. “I think that children of Holocaust survivors have a different outlook on life. It’s almost a preoccupation with the concept of evil. And so my book was an attempt to understand why people are attracted to malevolent personalities.

“For example, the main character, John Silver, he is a bad guy but at the same time he’s charismatic, he’s charming, he’s athletic, he’s funny and he’s witty. He’s good at everything he does and he’s better than everybody around him. He tends to have what I would call ‘negative charisma.’”

Society, in general, he said, is often attracted to overwhelming personalities. Some personalities, he said, are so outstanding and so overwhelming that they rapture people.

When his children were young he read “Treasure Island” to them. They were bored with the character Jim Hawkins, but really liked the character of Silver.

He thought, “We know very little about John Silver from ‘Treasure Island.’ We know a little about his history and whose ship he served on. Wouldn’t it be interesting to create a back story and take him from his youth, throughout his youth, and describe how he became John Silver and how he rose to power?”

Chupack said his family made many sacrifices while he wrote this book. When he was writing, he wasn’t spending time with them, which was difficult on everyone, he said. He said he has a couple other books in various writing stages.

“The difficult part of writing is that, especially successful book writers, and just like actors, you get typecast,” he said. “Because this caught the public’s fancy there is some interest in having me write, if not about the son of Silver, than at least a historical novel along the lines of ‘Silver.’”