For policy wonks and readers with a particular interest in New York.
An exemplary public servant recounts his eventful life at the intersection of business and politics.
In October 1975, with New York City facing bankruptcy, the president announced there would be no federal bailout. The Daily News headline famously translated his declaration as, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” Meanwhile, at the behest of Gov. Hugh Carey, Ravitch, among others, worked furiously to rescue the city. He had done this sort of financial troubleshooting before as head of the state’s Urban Development Corporation and would do so again as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and as lieutenant governor. Offering little about his personal life, Ravitch shuttles among stories about these and other high-profile public sector jobs and his work helming his family’s successful real estate development business, heading the Bowery Savings Bank and serving as the chief labor negotiator for Major League Baseball. A parade of famous names marches through the narrative, especially New York politicos—Rockefeller, Lindsay, Carey, Koch, Dinkins, Moynihan—but those looking for dish will be disappointed. With the exceptions of the Cuomos, father and son, Ravitch has little but good to say about his mentors and co-workers. Indeed, readers are surprised when he describes Joe DiMaggio as “a fairly boring fellow.” For the most part, this story features banks and budgets, credit and contracts, finance and finagling, unions and elected officials, negotiations and agreements. From these dull materials—albeit matters critical to the successful operation of our municipalities and states—Ravitch draws some lessons about our need to understand the true costs of public benefits, about balancing revenues and expenditures, and about the consequences of our failure to invest in education and infrastructure. He underlines the importance of our often messy political process and the necessity of establishing sound relationships to influence public policy, and he makes a plea for greater civic engagement.
For policy wonks and readers with a particular interest in New York.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-091-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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.
