An important story with broad ramifications.
According to veteran New York Times reporter and foreign correspondent DePalma (The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times, 2006, etc.), in the aftermath of 9/11, even those “most experienced at rescue” made decisions that had tragic consequences.
The author, a member of the team that wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning series “Portraits of Grief,” looks at the damage inflicted by the failure to adequately protect firefighters, police, construction workers and others in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center. He rejects any suggestion that there was a conspiracy by the Bush administration or New York City officials “to put profit ahead of people’s health” or “to hide the enormity of what happened.” However, he believes that a series of decisions, while neither outright subterfuge nor deliberate distortion of the facts, underestimated the danger from the toxic dust that covered the area of the explosion and buildings in the immediate neighborhood, needlessly exposing people to unnecessary health risks. “Some made in haste, some made with arrogance,” these decisions “favored the recovery of the city over the recovery of its people,” even though health-department and EPA officials, as well as firefighters, recognized that the dust was in all likelihood extremely toxic. Respirators were made available on-site, but they were unwieldy; rescue workers were not encouraged to wear them, and they worked long hours without medical supervision. The heroic frenzy of the original rescue effort was extended to the clean-up without regard to workers’ safety. Front-page headlines that exposed the dangers were disputed by the mayor, though they later proved to be accurate. A follow-up study of ground-zero workers released in 2006 estimated that seven out of ten suffered from “severe respiratory problems that persisted far longer than expected,” and limited studies indicate higher-than-expected mortality among that population.
An important story with broad ramifications.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-13-138566-5
Page Count: 330
Publisher: FT Press/Pearson
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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