Succeeds in demystifying the world of large-scale urban contracting, but will probably have more emotional resonance for...
A valedictory account of a life spent in large-building construction in New York City.
In addition to his duties as chairman of Kreisler Borg Florman General Construction Company, Florman (The Aftermath: A Novel of Survival, 2001, etc.) has authored six books and more than 250 articles. Here he combines memoir with an account of the hazards, complexities and joys of his trade. The resulting synthesis is somewhat unwieldy, although Florman’s style is accessible and wry. The author writes that despite the litany of grief associated with the trade, ranging from violent mobsters to risks on the job site, “I look back on this career with relish…because of the challenges met, the rousing adventures encountered.” It seemed an improbable occupation for a bookish Jewish boy in Depression-era New York, but wartime service in the Seabees opened up a fascinating industrial world to him: “Such [broad] experience can’t be bought in engineering school.” After the war, he worked his way up in the trade, first as an estimator, then a project manager; feeling frustrated, he joined a general contracting start-up in 1956, and soon bought in as a partner. KBF went on to have both success and good fortune, moving from school construction in the 1950s into large-scale urban and government projects. Despite Florman’s keen discussions of the complex minutiae of construction firms’ actual operation, his approach is mostly sentimental, with a lot of focus on the characters he’s known (especially at his own firm). The book is organized to highlight certain themes relevant to the industry’s development through the 20th century. Readers may wish the author had dug deeper into his juiciest subtopics, including the legendary corruption of building inspectors, the true degree of Mafia penetration in the industry, the still-contested role of women and the violent struggles for affirmative action on job sites.
Succeeds in demystifying the world of large-scale urban contracting, but will probably have more emotional resonance for older readers, in and out of the field.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-64167-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
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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