A solid image of what a mayor's job entails and of the kind of person who can do it.
Boston's former five-term mayor opens up about his hopes for the country, service to his city and a life well lived.
Boston's first Italian-American mayor, ironically known as “mumbles” and renowned for putting his foot in his mouth whenever he spoke, Menino successfully led the reorganization and improvement of the city's school system, as well as its police and fire departments. The author boasts that he was known as “the peoples' Mayor” both because he represented them well and had also met half of them as he walked the streets of the city's neighborhoods. With the assistance of NPR’s On Point news analyst Beatty (The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began, 2012, etc.), Menino highlights his 80 percent approval rating when he left office in January 2014, the month after the marathon bombing. That incident focused attention on the different powers of federal, state and local governments and showed Menino successfully securing cooperation from federal agencies to release the key video footage needed to hunt down the perpetrators. His continuing approach to economic inequality, “the greatest threat to social hope in America,” involves similar cooperative principles. As he notes, “cities can recharge their own economies,” but what can cities do about inequality? Menino's hopes include a federal “second New Deal for the information age.” When he began his term, the 911 emergency response system had transformed policing, and he helped bring back foot patrols in neighborhoods. He also changed the outdated fire department work rules, which still presumed that fighting fires was the department's only duty. The author relates how he brought investment to the city—e.g., the new high-tech district around Boston's formerly decrepit harbor area.
A solid image of what a mayor's job entails and of the kind of person who can do it.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0544302495
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
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