A touch too uncritical for readers brought up on hardnosed journalistic takes on politicians, but of interest to students of...
Generally admiring biography of the New York politician whom many have criticized but few have outflanked.
Former New York Times columnist Purnick has been on the mayoral beat for years. Her study of Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor, takes a heavy human-interest approach, more befitting a magazine piece than the front page. We learn that Bloomberg, in the manner of Elvis, is fond of peanut butter and burnt bacon, and that his style of managing “takes self-control, coolness, a refusal to indulge emotions or denounce the obstacles, and no vindictiveness or grudge-holding.” Those are good traits for a politico to have, to be sure—even one who spent $100, by Purnick’s reckoning, for every vote he won in the second-term 2005 race, and who revels in “racist, sexist and homophobic jokes” that would normally put an end to a political career backed by shallower pockets. The author does a solid job contrasting Bloomberg’s style with predecessor Rudy Giuliani’s. “Avuncular he is not,” Purnick avers, but Bloomberg gets things done, including carefully lobbying for a suspension of the term-limits rule to bag himself a third tour of the mayor’s office. The author’s careful account of that victory—a worthy case study for anyone seeking ways to game a system designed to protect voters from anti-democratic dynasties—is worth the price of the book.
A touch too uncritical for readers brought up on hardnosed journalistic takes on politicians, but of interest to students of Gotham politics.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-577-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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
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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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