Accomplished but finally dispiriting, as the wry, revealing dialogue and gritty South Philly detail give way to sour...
Drawing on the series of articles he wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday magazine, bestselling author Bowden (Black Hawk Down, 1999, etc.) tells the comic but ultimately pathetic true story of a loser whose life turned upside down when he stumbled on $1.2 million.
On February 26, 1981, Joey Coyle found two big containers of unmarked $100 bills that had fallen out of an armored truck. An unemployed, drug-addicted longshoreman dismissed by both friends and enemies as too stupid to care about, Coyle was suddenly rich beyond his dreams. Of course, the cops were on the case minutes after the money was reported missing, and Coyle was busted seven days later at a New York airport while attempting to escape to Acapulco. Because he gave some of the money to friends in wildly generous sprees, the city's media called Coyle a hero: “One of the things that kept reporters out there looking for stories every day, year after year,” Bowden grumbles, “was a belief in miracles, in the stubborn vitality of goodness, in the ultimate triumph of the little guy.” His narrative is more sympathetic to the law enforcers, from “rumpled, steady” police detective Pat Laurenzi to Assistant District Attorney Robert Casey, “a crisp young man with an easy, professional manner” who contended at the trial that Coyle never intended to turn any of the loot in, and that made him a thief. But “short, cocky” defense lawyer Harold Kane persuaded the jury to acquit by arguing that finding all that money rendered his poor client temporarily insane. The author depicts Coyle as a self-destructive junkie who used money and drugs to burn himself out, a judgment that seems especially tough-minded since Coyle committed suicide three weeks before the release of a sanitized Disney movie based on Bowden’s Inquirer articles.
Accomplished but finally dispiriting, as the wry, revealing dialogue and gritty South Philly detail give way to sour cynicism.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-87113-859-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.
Remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Smith (Rethinking America, 1995, etc.).
“Over the past three decades,” writes the author, “we have become Two Americas.” We have arrived at a new Gilded Age, where “gross inequality of income and wealth” have become endemic. Such inequality is not simply the result of “impersonal and irresistible market forces,” but of quite deliberate corporate strategies and the public policies that enabled them. Smith sets out on a mission to trace the history of these strategies and policies, which transformed America from a roughly fair society to its current status as a plutocracy. He leaves few stones unturned. CEO culture has moved since the 1970s from a concern for the general well-being of society, including employees, to the single-minded pursuit of personal enrichment and short-term increases in stock prices. During much of the ’70s, CEO pay was roughly 40 times a worker’s pay; today that number is 367. Whether it be through outsourcing and factory closings, corporate reneging on once-promised contributions to employee health and retirement funds, the deregulation of Wall Street and the financial markets, a tax code which favors overwhelmingly the interests of corporate heads and the superrich—all of which Smith examines in fascinating detail—the American middle class has been left floundering. For its part, government has simply become an enabler and partner of the rich, as the rich have turned wealth into political influence and rigid conservative opposition has created the politics of gridlock. What, then, is to be done? Here, Smith’s brilliant analyses turn tepid, as he advocates for “a peaceful political revolution at the grassroots” to realign the priorities of government and the economy but offers only the vaguest of clues as to how this might occur.
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6966-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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