Books: Bestseller Revisited

MY LIFE IN COURT (524 pp.)—Louis Nizer—Doubleday ($5.95).

Nudist. War profiteer. Absentee war correspondent. Liar. Fourflusher. Sycophant. Coat holder.

On Dec. 12, 1949 terrible-tempered Columnist Westbrook Pegler fired off these charges against his onetime friend Author-Journalist Quentin Reynolds, in a tirade printed in 186 newspapers read by 12 million people. Reynolds retained Manhattan Attorney Louis Nizer to press charges for libel. Five years later, the case finally came to trial. Nizer forced Pegler to admit that he had once written that "it was all right to create fiction about a real person, because if...