A cheeky tell-all from a man with a lot to tell: Providence's notorious felon mayor, credited with cleaning up the city in the dirtiest possible way.
Mike Stanton's bestseller The Prince of Providence (2003) did not paint a rosy picture of the former mayor, who was once ousted from office on an assault charge and once sent to federal prison for five years for racketeering. Now a free man, the enigmatic politician wants to share his side of the story—and what a story it is. The crimes are, of course, major points of interest. Cianci argues that the several acquittals that accompanied his racketeering conviction prove that he was largely guilty by association, certainly not worthy of what he calls his “five-year free vacation in a gated community.” As for the assault, while the author admits that it wasn't his finest day, he also cries hyperbole. Rather than hitting his estranged wife's lover with a fireplace log, he merely threatened him, and the ashtray that he threw “in his direction” was not intended to hit him. In between bouts of authorial self-defense, Cianci tells the fascinating story of his rise to power and the profound transformation that Providence underwent under his command. When he started his career prosecuting some of the country's most notorious mobsters, Providence was struggling, to put it kindly, and some of his successes over 21 years in office are indisputable. He attracted New England's biggest mall, reduced crime, spearheaded public-arts initiatives and even moved the Providence River, creating an attractive and usable downtown. What was once considered an almost uninhabitable city became known in the late ’90s and early ’00s as a Renaissance City, labeled by several magazines as one of the best places to live in America. Getting the inside scoop on this miraculous urban revival is almost as intriguing as the gory details of his fall from grace. As colorful on the page as he is in person, Cianci is a natural storyteller with a lot to say. For politics junkies, this is a great guilty pleasure—pun intended.
Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59280-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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