A fitting memorial: solid, well-researched, and full of ably reconstructed plot turns, worthy of a place alongside Robert...
Overstuffed but readable life of the famed politician who created “out of a congeries of five quasi-independent, overly politicized counties one glorious city.”
Pugnacious, determined, sometimes unbearably rude, Fiorello LaGuardia (1882–1947) seemed to some in his time to be a living symbol of New York. His sensibilities, though, were those of a frontier crusader; born in Arizona during the Apache wars, he learned in the territories “to despise purveyors of racial hatred and ignorance,” writes Brodsky (Grover Cleveland, 2000), “and to identify with the underdog and the downtrodden.” After serving as a US consul in Trieste, LaGuardia made his way to New York determined to make his name as a reformer. Though it can be argued that he changed a few belts in the machine rather than scrapping it, he proved to be a champion of labor and the poor over several terms in the US Congress, where, among other things, he cosponsored legislation to restrict local courts’ powers to interfere with labor strikes or picketing. Elected mayor of New York in 1933, LaGuardia forged out of the five boroughs a united metropolis whose government was so well-organized that the city was allowed to administer its own federal-relief programs during the Depression, giving it in effect status as a state. Brodsky is sometimes overawed by LaGuardia, whom he considers to be “the last great paradigm of honesty and incorruptibility in American political history,” but he makes a good case for the Little Flower’s many virtues as a leader and human being even as he is moved to wonder why no one seems to remember LaGuardia except as the guy an airport is named for.
A fitting memorial: solid, well-researched, and full of ably reconstructed plot turns, worthy of a place alongside Robert Caro’s The Power Broker on the long shelf of good books devoted to New York politics.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28737-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Truman Talley/St. Martin’s
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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