Insider play-by-play with politicians, potential profiteers, and top architects scrambling for the plum: an absorbing, if...
The tortuous trail of conflicts and compromises that resulted in the project to erect the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower on the Ground Zero site.
No benediction this, but New Yorker architecture critic Goldberger does credit the principal forces behind Freedom Tower for bashing the monumental egos, greasing the political skids, and mollifying contentious special interests in order to get to the point where idealism would confront cynicism: “So far,” he contends, “they have battled to a draw.” Goldberger ably frames the situation immediately after 9/11. Many, including then–Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the majority of victims’ survivors, strongly urged that the “hallowed ground” of the former World Trade Center’s Twin Towers remain forever undeveloped as the only fitting memorial. Another faction, led by developer Larry Silverstein, who had leased the WTC property from the New York/New Jersey Port Authority, wanted to immediately throw up an even more spectacular tower to demonstrate America’s resilience—and maximize the insurance benefit along the way. Cooler heads, Goldberger documents, were able to rein in the impulsiveness on both sides and let the mourning play out while fostering public forums and a competition for a replacement structure. In the 9/11 aftermath, however, tall buildings were suddenly viewed as dinosaurs, and corporations were dispersing key staff to multiple, often suburban, locations. But pressure from New York Governor George Pataki (coincidentally facing an election) and others kept the newly formed Lower Manhattan Development Commission’s eye on the ball: a project that could be commercially successful while at the same time embodying unique attributes befitting a Ground Zero memorial. In the end, Goldberger allows, it’s all about how another big deal gets done in the big city.
Insider play-by-play with politicians, potential profiteers, and top architects scrambling for the plum: an absorbing, if not inspiring, record.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6017-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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