A robust, richly documented biography.
A biography of urban planner Ed Logue (1921-2000).
In fashion across the United States after World War II, “urban renewal” often meant razing low-income neighborhoods to build new highways and upscale housing, displacing people of color without providing adequate relocation services. Logue, a sometimes acerbic, supremely confident planner and academic, earned a reputation as a public administrator sensitive to the needs of the poor as well as the wealthy. Starting in New Haven, Logue—in tandem with the mayor, legislators, and private-sector developers—won national and then international acclaim for improving city life for a significant percentage of residents. While those being displaced sometimes complained that Logue failed to listen to their wishes and needs, Cohen (American Studies/Harvard Univ.; A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 2003, etc.) demonstrates that Logue did sincerely consider the relocation of low-income residents, even while appearing condescending at times. Convinced he had accomplished all he could in New Haven, he accepted the challenge of urban renewal in Boston, a city with more serious problems, both in terms of financing and regarding white residents who were pushing back against mixed-race neighborhoods. While working through the Boston obstacles, Logue received an offer from New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to implement urban renewal throughout New York state. In this deeply researched work, Cohen skillfully chronicles Logue’s rise and fall during his New York tenure, which ended in the mid-1980s. “As opportunities allowed it, [he] enjoyed being what I have described as a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast, using his powerful position to pursue his goals and, if necessary, impose his own standards and values on projects and people,” writes the author. “But over time Logue learned that this role did not always serve him well.” Though Logue’s life stands on its own, it’s inevitable that readers will compare this book to Robert Caro’s lauded Robert Moses biography, The Power Broker. While it’s not that, Cohen’s portrait is well rounded and useful for public officials and students of city planning and public works.
A robust, richly documented biography.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-25408-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
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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