Taming the Storm

The unelected federal judge who, in Bill Moyers's words, ``altered forever the face of the South,'' comes alive in this substantial biography. Bass, author of a previous book on Southern judges ( Unlikely Heroes ), first depicts Johnson as a product of the fiercely independent hills of northwest Alabama and the son of a mother with strong convictions. Drawing on extensive interviews with Johnson and his associates, Bass describes Johnson's early years, including his influential experiences in law school, before he became a judge and intersected with the civil rights movement: ruling on bus segregation, voting rights and school desegregation, and suffering the bombing of his mother's house and vitriol from his law school chum, Alabama governor George Wallace. Not just a moral beacon, Johnson, who recently retired, was a legal innovator, developing new judicial doctrines regarding state prisons and mental health institutions. Johnson claims his judicial approach is strictly legal with ``no interest in social change'' and the book's account makes that claim plausible. In a few chapters, such as one on the suicide of the judge's adopted son, Bass could have used less detail, but this book is a valuable piece of history. Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)