Altogether, a compelling portrait of New York and a must-read for residents and visitors alike.
A lively portrait of a city in constant transformation.
“Even if, statistically, New York was now smaller than Baoding and Tianjin and Hyderabad and many others, it still overwhelmed in its old familiar ways.” So writes Canadian transplant Taylor in this fine and fearless follow-up to Londoners (2013)—fine because it’s so thoughtful and revealing, fearless because the author’s method is to engage strangers in conversation that quickly becomes oral history. “So, are you looking for boldface names?” asks one woman, to which another interlocutor says, “No, he’s looking for the lightly italicized.” No matter the typeface and/or whether rich or poor, New Yorkers have a common fixation: money. One rapper exalts, “I mean, New York, New York, man, dollar slices.” If one could live on dollar slices alone, that’d be fine, but as a personal assistant to a chain of idle-rich people remarks, “The wealthy in New York—what they’re buying is time and so they don’t care,” particularly about how others’ time is spent waiting on them. A well-to-do worker in the financial sector says he wouldn’t want to raise a family in the city, citing a boss who says it costs him $25,000 per month to live comfortably there. One of Taylor’s subjects recounts time on Rikers Island; a blind man tells him about the smell of sex that used to pervade the air around the Port Authority bus terminal; a car thief instructs him in the art of evading police; and a sometimes-homeless man teaches him about the “three to four degrees of homelessness” that beset those down on their luck. “New York isn’t a real place,” complains one weary soul, while another, recently arrived from Arkansas, says, “I feel like I’m in a movie….I feel like it’s going to be a happy ending.”
Altogether, a compelling portrait of New York and a must-read for residents and visitors alike.Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-24232-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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 clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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