A meticulously researched, substantial contribution to New York history.
Earnest study of the famed New York “meddler” who spent a long life power-brokering, serving the public good in the bargain: an anti-Robert Moses, one might say.
Charles C. Burlingham, “CCB” to everyone who ever met him, grew up in the long shadow of the Civil War in a New York that had emerged as an international center of every sort of business imaginable. Conservative by sensibility but liberal by leaning, Burlingham lamented the loss of the old New York and the corruption that came with the new. Fittingly, perhaps, he chose as his profession the practice of admiralty or maritime law, governed by a code that largely derived from ancient seafaring laws of England. Yet even there the modern caught up to him; as admiring biographer Martin (Verdi at the Golden Gate, 1993, etc.) writes, Burlingham earned wide renown late in life as attorney for the defendant owners of the sunken ship Titanic, chief among them J. Pierpont Morgan, who, though forced to settle with the claimants in the aftermath of that tragedy, did so for $664,000 against $18 million, “less than 4 percent of that potential liability.” Morgan was grateful, and Burlingham was able to use the proceeds to expand his admiralty firm just at a time when New York’s importance as a port was ever increasing. Yet during all that time, Burlingham worked steadily to broaden his influence in political circles on both a local and national level; as Martin writes, “He had no power, no elective office or constituency at the polls, but he had influence with many who did,” including, still later in life, Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt. He was particularly skillful as a sort of fixer of legal matters, instrumental in advancing the careers of Felix Frankfurter, Benjamin Cardozo and other jurists. Martin closes his comprehensive biography by suggesting that Burlingham, a skilled practitioner of the arts of reasoned discourse, might fit in nicely today as a blogger—an opinionated shaper of opinion who, as one grudgingly admiring contemporary said, “was always aboveboard.”
A meticulously researched, substantial contribution to New York history.Pub Date: April 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-8090-7317-X
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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