"In March 1996, attorney Lawrence D. Mungin sat calmly at the plain wooden plaintiff's table in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. But he wasn't trying this case for a client. Mungin was the client. He had sued his employer, the large corporate law firm of Katten Muchin & Zavis. His claim was race discrimination ..." "He was a poor kid who grew up believing that if you played by the rules and worked hard, you'd succeed. And for a while he did. Larry Mungin's pursuit of the American Dream took him from a Queens housing project to Harvard Law School and to the Washington, D.C., office of Katten Muchin, a blue-chip Chicago law firm, where he worked toward achieving a coveted partnership. Everything was in place; he'd spent his whole life preparing to make it in the white world, and now he was ready to reap the rewards. But instead of becoming a partner, Mungin became the plaintiff in a racial discrimination suit that would rock the legal world and turn his life into a struggle for survival. What went wrong? What turned the American Dream into an American nightmare?" "In this eloquent and suspenseful work of nonfiction, Paul M. Barrett, who once shared a dorm room with Mungin at Harvard, takes you into the minefields of corporate America and inside our legal system on one man's journey across racial lines."--Jacket.