A remarkably incisive history and a wonderfully relevant contribution to an ongoing debate.
A detailed history of community development financial institutions and the overall effort to provide capital to the economically disenfranchised.
The “problem of providing access to capital to people on the economic margins” isn’t a new one, argues debut author Rosenthal, but dates back to the nation’s origins. At the end of the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin understood that “aspiring entrepreneurs of the working class” were stymied by insufficient access to capital, and he advocated a nascent version of microenterprise lending. And in the wake of the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau established banks specifically designed to serve former slaves. The author meticulously traces this history through the explosion of credit unions in the early 20th century, the recommitment to battling poverty in the 1960s, the proliferation of community reinvestment strategies in the 1970s, and opportunities generated by the banking scandals of the 1980s. The central focus of the book, though, is the creation of CDFIs, possible because of a law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994. Unlike those programs that preceded it, CDFIs were designed to be less centralized and bureaucratic and more adaptable to community needs. Rosenthal expertly discusses the approach’s sundry strengths and accomplishments and its weaknesses, too, particularly with respect to the funding of social services, education, and health. And while the author’s history is granularly detailed, he raises provocative, philosophical questions about what we’ve cumulatively learned over the years: “How do we describe the universe of diverse institutions that bear that brand—now arguably the most valuable one in community development? Finally, what is the nature of the social phenomenon that we call community development finance?” Rosenthal is more than a detached observer—he led the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions for more than 30 years, the source of both his deep knowledge and obvious passion for the subject. His account is magisterially thorough and thoughtful—and timely given renewed calls to defund the CDFIs.
A remarkably incisive history and a wonderfully relevant contribution to an ongoing debate.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3662-5
Page Count: 556
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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