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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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