A frank, unique look at the many challenges in New York City politics.
A former New York City mayor recounts his personal journey from humble roots to running America’s most iconic metropolis.
With the assistance of Knobler (co-author: Fairy Tales Can Come True: How a Driven Woman Changed Her Destiny, 2003, etc.), Dinkins (School of International and Public Affairs/Columbia Univ.) reflects on his unexpected path from poverty to the mayor’s office. At 18—after a childhood spent enamored with the entrepreneurial spirit—Dinkins traded in his business ventures to enlist as a Marine. After being honorably discharged when the war ended, he returned stateside to face the same racial discrimination he had known before. When he was refused service in a bar, Dinkins learned the power of the legal system, deciding to become a lawyer soon after. With memberships in the Harlem Lawyers Association, the Urban League and the NAACP, among others, it wasn’t long, however, before Dinkins became “part of the fabric of New York politics” as well. In 1985, Dinkins was elected Manhattan borough president, a position that gave him good footing for the mayoral office, a post he won in 1989. After defeating Democratic incumbent Ed Koch in the primary and Rudy Giuliani in the general election, Dinkins became the first African-American to hold the office. Despite the historical first, his tenure as mayor was not without its difficulties. Though he attempted to tackle New York's crime problems, racial strife continued to plague the city. No example better illustrates this strife than the mob-induced murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish man killed at the hands of African-Americans. Though the story’s complexities run deep, the result was a borough more racially divided than ever—feelings that soon reverberated throughout the city and cost Dinkins his re-election bid. “Of course I wish it never happened,” Dinkins writes. “But I never did, nor will I start now, blame anyone else for what occurred on my watch.”
A frank, unique look at the many challenges in New York City politics.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61039-301-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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