An inspiring story of a defiant woman and the landscape she loved.
How a public-private partnership revitalized Manhattan’s famed park.
In 1980, Rogers (Green Metropolis: The Extraordinary Landscapes of New York City as Nature, History, and Design, 2016, etc.), as the first Central Park administrator, founded the Central Park Conservancy, a nonprofit corporation whose mission was to rescue the park from a “dire condition” of deterioration and return it to a state of scenic beauty and clean, safe recreation. Decades of neglect, coupled with the use of the park for “mass events and bizarre happenings,” had resulted in crumbling buildings, eroded slopes, graffiti-emblazoned walls and sculptures, and trampled vegetation. Tourists were told to avoid the park, which had a reputation for being “dangerous and scary.” Rogers looked back to the park’s picturesque past, embracing the aesthetic of 19th-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who transformed “a ragged 843-acre wasteland” into “a masterpiece of landscape design and paragon of social beneficence” in a mere 15 years. Her task was daunting: She had “no authority over park workers, no city funds to hire new ones, and no way to reform existing union rules linked to narrowly defined civil service job titles.” Private support was essential, and Rogers identifies with gratitude three early benefactors, the “Great Park Ladies” Brooke Astor, Iphigene Sulzberger, and Lucy Moses. By the time Rogers left her position in 1995, the Conservancy had donated more than $100 million of private money to restoring the park, and the organization became a model for other public-private partnerships. Besides offering a historical overview, Rogers documents the challenges she faced from city administrators and private individuals. Bird-watchers, for example, once mounted a vicious campaign when the Conservancy planned to thin out some trees, and a proposed memorial to John Lennon was saved only because of the flexibility and generosity of Yoko Ono. Rogers learned that effective leadership required the three Ps—patience, passion, and persistence—as well as power, politics, and “the purse.”
An inspiring story of a defiant woman and the landscape she loved.Pub Date: May 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3355-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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