Using data, interview and anecdote, David assembles a brief but interesting history of the country’s largest city—though he...
Veteran Crain’s New York Business contributor David, who directs the business reporting program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, profiles the long-term trends that have stimulated the city’s economic recovery.
The author identifies financial services, tourism, film and TV production and higher education as the primary sectors that have helped turn the city around since its fiscal crisis in the 1970s. Contrary to expectations, David shows that the New York City's economy is not as dependent on the ups and downs of Wall Street as the rest of the country; as evidence he cites the 2008 economic collapse and the 1982 recession, along with New York’s own deep recession in the ’70s, when more than 600,000 jobs were lost. One tendency remains clear: Manufacturing jobs have disappeared. After World War II, the city could count around 1 million workers in manufacturing, while in 2009 there were fewer than 100,000. Examining the tourism industry, David notes that the city greets 50 million tourists per year, with 10 million coming from abroad, and puts them up in 96,000 hotel rooms (double the capacity of the mid ’80s). The author also assesses the role of all the mayors of the city, singling out for special praise the economic policies of Ed Koch and Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg has provided the impetus for many innovative approaches, including a competitive effort to design a world-class graduate-school–level incubator for modern engineering businesses. However, with more than 190,000 jobs and an average yearly salary of more than $400,000, Wall Street provides 20 percent of the state's finances and 13 percent of the city's receipts (without considering property and sales taxes).
Using data, interview and anecdote, David assembles a brief but interesting history of the country’s largest city—though he does not address whether Wall Street’s global financial position will be enough to keep the city moving forward.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-11510-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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