The author’s historical perspective helps shape his provocative view, though he doesn’t examine whether the demographic...
A political scientist looks at a possible “demographic inversion” in which America's cities may follow in the footsteps of late-19th-century European capitals: “affluent and stylish urban core[s] surrounded by poorer people and an immigrant working class on the periphery.”
With large public-housing complexes demolished and their former inhabitants pushed into the outer suburbs, young professionals, senior citizens and other groups are beginning to find their way back to older central city neighborhoods. Pew Center on the States information director Ehrenhalt’s (Democracy in the Mirror: Politics, Reform and Reality in Grassroots America, 1998, etc.) main examples are Chicago's Sheffield neighborhood, which has gone from an urban wasteland to one of the city's most fashionable and desirable locations, and New York City’s financial district, where commercial office buildings have been converted to residential uses and the evening streets are populated by couples with baby carriages. Ehrenhalt finds the historical parallels for this process in the renewal and reconstruction of city centers in 1890s Paris and Vienna. He also discusses cities where he doesn't think such revivals are possible, including Philadelphia and Baltimore, both of which have locally focused political structures based on privately owned row houses with small lots, and the former industrial wasteland of Detroit. Between these extremes he presents cases like Phoenix, which has tried multiple times to build a center city that never existed, and continues to fail. Ehrenhalt points to Northern Virginia's Tysons Corner—now the twelfth largest business district in the United States”—as the test case for whether a commercial strip, lacking residential development, can be transformed into a unified city-type center.
The author’s historical perspective helps shape his provocative view, though he doesn’t examine whether the demographic trends will generate either the financing or the wider employment that Paris and Vienna were able to stimulate in their own unique ways.Pub Date: April 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-27274-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A powerful voice on behalf of young people who should not be stigmatized but need support from schools and communities to...
An unvarnished account of one woman's painful “journey from victim to survivor,” as she came to understand the “dynamics of commercial sexual exploitation, especially child sex trafficking.”
In this debut, Smith, a public advocate for trafficking victims, begins in 1992 with her own experience. At the age of 14, she was briefly a prostitute before being rescued by the police. Since she was manipulated rather than subjected to violence, she was shamed by the false belief that she had chosen to be a prostitute. Only in 2009, three years after her marriage, did she feel able to reveal her story and give testimony before Congress. She blames the media for objectifying sexuality and creating an environment in which an estimated 100,000 in the U.S. are victimized annually. Smith describes how one afternoon, she was walking through the mall when a young man approached her. They flirted briefly, and he slipped her his phone number, asking her to get in touch. She describes her vulnerability to his approach. She was socially insecure. Both of her parents were alcoholics, and before the age of 10, she had been repeatedly abused sexually by a cousin. In her eagerness to have a boyfriend, she responded to his come-on and agreed to a meeting. As it turned out, he was profiling her for a pimp, and it was the pimp who met her—accompanied by a prostitute, there to show her the ropes. Their approach was nonthreatening, and they suggested that, in the future, she might have a career in modeling. Many unhappy children, writes the author, “are lured into trusting their traffickers” due to their lack of self-esteem. In the aftermath of the experience, although she finished college and had a successful career, Smith struggled with depression and substance abuse.
A powerful voice on behalf of young people who should not be stigmatized but need support from schools and communities to protect them from predators.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27873-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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