Strahan's prose, over-salted with adverbs, bromides, and sweeping generalizations, is well suited to dishing an...
A real-life Confederacy of Dunces records the "dysfunctional corporate family'' history of a New Orleans institution, Lucky Dogs, Inc.
The company's hotdog-shaped vending carts are a French Quarter fixture; its motley crew of transient wienie vendors were the apparent inspiration for John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prizewinning farce. Strahan, a Lucky Dog vendor and manager intermittently since 1968, is the straight man among the clowns. He's a self-described "conservative redneck'' whose disapproval of gay lifestyles and unenviable position of authority over a constantly changing and largely unmanageable army of Ignatius J. Reillys lends his account of Big Easy street life (especially portions dealing with the quarter's randy days during the '60s and '70s) an air of censoriousness. The Lucky Dogs crew—restless drifters, Vietnam vets, drunks, small-time swindlers, transvestites, carnies, and the occasional college kid—suffer misadventures more pathetic than madcap. Strahan mediates their disputes with loan sharks, pimps, irate landlords, and jealous lovers with wearied aplomb, and his accounts of these confrontations are largely tributes to his own judiciousness and wisdom. He's obviously a man of character (more than once he rehires employees who previously skipped town with the day's receipts) and a heads-up businessman: When a four-star restaurant banishes a cart for stealing too many customers, Strahan asks for the request in writing, then threatens to run it as an ad in the local paper. He guides the company's expansion into New Orleans's casinos and overseas, eventually landing a spot at that haven of American street cuisine, Euro-Disney.
Strahan's prose, over-salted with adverbs, bromides, and sweeping generalizations, is well suited to dishing an entrepreneurial success story. But as an interpretive, first-person history of New Orleans's funky street life, Managing Ignatius can't cut the mustard.Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8071-2241-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
Pugnacious arguments in favor of a single-payer health plan for the United States, along with instructions for building a mass movement to get one. In 1994, Andrews took part in the failed campaign for Proposition 186, the California Health Security Act, which called for the creation of a single-payer health plan in that state, thereby eliminating commercial insurance companies from health care. Before getting into the California campaign, however, he sketches a history of health care in this country from the 1930s, when Blue Cross was born, to the 1990s and the floundering health reform efforts of the Clinton administration. In the author's words, it is the story of ``the forces that developed medicine from a set of professions to a corporatized industry.'' His antibusiness stance can also be seen in such chapter headings as ``Feeding at the Trough: Insurance Companies'' and in his use of loaded terms like ``fat bankrolls,'' ``slick lobbyists,'' and ``hired guns.'' Andrews takes a brief look at health care in Japan, Sweden, and North Vietnam, and a slightly longer one at Germany and Great Britain. Canada, however, gets the most attention, because its single-payer system is, the author insists, the only way to go. Andrews describes in some detail how Proposition 186 was designed for California, how it got on the ballot, who supported it and who opposed it, how the two sides organized, and what strategies did or didn't work. The heart of the book is the author's analysis of the campaign's failure and the lessons to be learned from it. As Andrews sees it, the principal problem was that supporters of Proposition 186 were trying to sell a product when they should have been building a movement. Filled with all the fervor of an uncompromising reformer certain of the truth of his message.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56751-057-4
Page Count: 150
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
Combining brilliant scholarship with a novelist’s feel for human drama, Orey recounts how a determined group of lawyers and whistle-blowers brought the tobacco industry to its knees. Wall Street Journal editor Orey opens his odyssey in rural Mississippi, where in 1986 attorney Don Barrett began a decade-long holy war against Big Tobacco. Confronting an undefeated foe with seemingly limitless resources, Barrett was in for a long but ultimately successful struggle. He faced two major obstacles: first, the delaying, war-of-attrition tactics used by the tobacco companies to wear down plaintiffs, and, second, the tendency of juries to blame smokers for their own predicaments. Orey lucidly explains the complex legal and medical issues involved in tobacco litigation, but he’s even better at describing the maddeningly complex personalities involved. Barrett, a former segregationist, built his reputation representing African-Americans in front of Mississippi juries. Like Captain Ahab, the Bible-pounding Barrett viewed his foes as “truly forces of evil to be vanquished.” Merrell Williams, an ex-actor who stole documents proving that the tobacco industry had systematically deceived the public about smoking, is a fascinating blend of hippie idealism and self-promoting opportunism. Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore is a smart politician who knows a good issue when he sees one. Just as public sentiment was turning against Big Tobacco in the early 1990s, Moore (and other state attorneys general) decided to sue the industry to recoup Medicaid funds spent on smokers. In 1996, Moore, Barrett, and other antitobacco advocates won a historic victory when Liggett became the first cigarette maker to settle a smoking-related lawsuit. Within a year, the whole industry had cut a deal, agreeing to pay $368.5 billion to smokers and their lawyers. Unfortunately, Congress rejected the settlement, and the tobacco wars continue. A tale of breathtaking, even Homeric, scope, filled with greed, good intentions, and a collection of deeply flawed “heroes”; scholars and the general reader will find ample reasons to rejoice.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-66489-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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