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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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