A sturdy biography; though not uncritical, probably best suited to those inclined to be well-disposed toward Bloomberg and...
A biography of three-term New York mayor Michael Bloomberg (b. 1942).
There was a time, early on in Bloomberg’s bid for the mayoralty of New York, that someone leaked a gag gift given to him by his staff, a 30-page compendium of foulmouthed, cynical sayings—“politically incorrect does not begin to describe them,” writes McNickle, a former executive in global investment firms and treasurer of the American Historical Association. Consternation ensued, as political opponents lodged charges of racism, sexism, and classism in a race that got ever more heated—and, as the author writes, ever costlier, with Bloomberg, a media and real estate billionaire, spending $74 million to his Democratic opponent’s $16.6 million. The big-ticket aspect of the narrative is a constant, for Bloomberg had endless resources and was committed to converting the city from “an unintended monument to time-gone-by into a place where the future could happen.” In the course of that transformation, McNickle writes, large portions of the city became unaffordable, “one of the root causes of the long-standing homeless crisis.” The author credits Bloomberg for some innovations in government operations but, in some of the sharpest critiques of the book, also notes that the current mayor, Bill de Blasio inherited a fantastic mess in terms of public housing and anti-poverty programs. Bloomberg also was slow to support the living wage, saying, “the last time we really had a big managed economy was the USSR and that didn’t work out so well.” Unafraid to use numbers or evoke fiscal policy, McNickle covers a lot of ground capably, arguing that Bloomberg’s preference was always for market solutions to social problems, placing him as an economic and social centrist in a time of increasingly fringe-driven politics.
A sturdy biography; though not uncritical, probably best suited to those inclined to be well-disposed toward Bloomberg and his years in office.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2257-6
Page Count: 460
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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