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 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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