The kind of successfully fluid story that could be written only by someone who has seen and connected the dots, studied the...
A blistering and memorable portrait of a man and a city whose politics went bad a long time ago and stayed that way, from the Pulitzer-winning Providence Journal investigative reporter.
It is joked, writes Stanton, that Providence, Rhode Island, was the “America's first safe house,” a haven for freethinkers and the persecuted in Puritan New England. But the colony's wide-open mores also made it, as Cotton Mather so elegantly noted, the fag end of creation. By the time Buddy Cianci became mayor, for the first time, in 1974, the city was understood to be a hotbed of political corruption, ably sketched out by Stanton in a profile of Raymond Patriarca, mob boss and unelected mayor. Though Cianci ran on an anti-corruption ticket, he soon learned that “once you came down from the East Side and crossed the river into the rest of Providence, you needed political grease and muscle. You had to cut deals. You needed an organization.” In Providence, the blueprint was already in place and Cianci hewed to the line, namely scams, shakedowns, bribes, and kickbacks, while also demonstrating his willingness to go beyond the standard ego strutting of politics into something scarier, a taste for cruelty that got him uprooted from the mayoralty when he was convicted of assault in a particularly nasty act of mayhem. Six years later, he's back in office, and back at doing what he does best: “running a criminal enterprise out of the mayor's office that, during the 1990s, had extorted more that two million dollars in kickbacks for jobs, contracts, and favors.” From the brightly illuminated picture of the city Stanton has created, that can only have been the tip of the big berg that lurks off the radar. Buddy's now in the clink.
The kind of successfully fluid story that could be written only by someone who has seen and connected the dots, studied the resulting picture for years and from many perspectives, observed the changes, and even sensed them.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50780-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
