A splendidly detailed great American epic.
A gritty, down-and-dirty saga about the Irish politicos who “ruled Boston for nearly a century,” from 1902 to 1993.
Pulitzer Prize–winning ex–Boston Globe investigative reporter O'Neill provides a candid look at the political machinations that built, and destroyed, a legendary American city. He begins with the famine ships that arrived with the “bedraggled [Irish] newcomers” who became the scourge of Yankee Boston. These immigrants quickly learned that the only way they could lay claim to “jobs, education [and] religious tolerance” would be through bare-knuckle politics. Boston elected its first Irish mayor in 1884, but O'Neill begins with a portrait of the shrewd and magnetic John “Honey” Fitzgerald, maternal grandfather of John F. Kennedy, who served as mayor from 1906 to 1908 and again from 1910 to 1914. By this time, other ambitious Irishmen, such as the infamous Ward 8 boss Martin Lomasney and the combative Boston Common Councilman (and later four-time mayor) James Michael Curley, were also on the scene. All engaged in cloak-and-dagger political schemes to enhance their power, while Curley unabashedly used his position to enrich himself at the city's expense. As Machiavellian as they were charming, these men brought Boston into the modern era—and to the brink of bankruptcy. Mid-century redeemers such as Mayors John Hynes and John Collins and urban planner Ed Logue brought the city back through programs that renewed parts of the city at the expense of creating enmity between numerous social and ethnic groups. They left Mayor Kevin White the unenviable task of guiding Boston through the desegregation crisis of the 1970s. Eager to put the city's tumultuous past behind him, White focused on making Boston "world-class," while the last “mayoral mick,” Ray Flynn, attempted to make a city now increasingly divided between rich and poor livable for all.
A splendidly detailed great American epic.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-40536-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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