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 He also changed the outdated fire department work rules, which still presumed that fighting fires was the department's only duty.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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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