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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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