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
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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