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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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