by Paul Goldberger ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2004
Insider play-by-play with politicians, potential profiteers, and top architects scrambling for the plum: an absorbing, if...
The tortuous trail of conflicts and compromises that resulted in the project to erect the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower on the Ground Zero site.
No benediction this, but New Yorker architecture critic Goldberger does credit the principal forces behind Freedom Tower for bashing the monumental egos, greasing the political skids, and mollifying contentious special interests in order to get to the point where idealism would confront cynicism: “So far,” he contends, “they have battled to a draw.” Goldberger ably frames the situation immediately after 9/11. Many, including then–Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the majority of victims’ survivors, strongly urged that the “hallowed ground” of the former World Trade Center’s Twin Towers remain forever undeveloped as the only fitting memorial. Another faction, led by developer Larry Silverstein, who had leased the WTC property from the New York/New Jersey Port Authority, wanted to immediately throw up an even more spectacular tower to demonstrate America’s resilience—and maximize the insurance benefit along the way. Cooler heads, Goldberger documents, were able to rein in the impulsiveness on both sides and let the mourning play out while fostering public forums and a competition for a replacement structure. In the 9/11 aftermath, however, tall buildings were suddenly viewed as dinosaurs, and corporations were dispersing key staff to multiple, often suburban, locations. But pressure from New York Governor George Pataki (coincidentally facing an election) and others kept the newly formed Lower Manhattan Development Commission’s eye on the ball: a project that could be commercially successful while at the same time embodying unique attributes befitting a Ground Zero memorial. In the end, Goldberger allows, it’s all about how another big deal gets done in the big city.
Insider play-by-play with politicians, potential profiteers, and top architects scrambling for the plum: an absorbing, if not inspiring, record.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6017-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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