A frank, unique look at the many challenges in New York City politics.
A former New York City mayor recounts his personal journey from humble roots to running America’s most iconic metropolis.
With the assistance of Knobler (co-author: Fairy Tales Can Come True: How a Driven Woman Changed Her Destiny, 2003, etc.), Dinkins (School of International and Public Affairs/Columbia Univ.) reflects on his unexpected path from poverty to the mayor’s office. At 18—after a childhood spent enamored with the entrepreneurial spirit—Dinkins traded in his business ventures to enlist as a Marine. After being honorably discharged when the war ended, he returned stateside to face the same racial discrimination he had known before. When he was refused service in a bar, Dinkins learned the power of the legal system, deciding to become a lawyer soon after. With memberships in the Harlem Lawyers Association, the Urban League and the NAACP, among others, it wasn’t long, however, before Dinkins became “part of the fabric of New York politics” as well. In 1985, Dinkins was elected Manhattan borough president, a position that gave him good footing for the mayoral office, a post he won in 1989. After defeating Democratic incumbent Ed Koch in the primary and Rudy Giuliani in the general election, Dinkins became the first African-American to hold the office. Despite the historical first, his tenure as mayor was not without its difficulties. Though he attempted to tackle New York's crime problems, racial strife continued to plague the city. No example better illustrates this strife than the mob-induced murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish man killed at the hands of African-Americans. Though the story’s complexities run deep, the result was a borough more racially divided than ever—feelings that soon reverberated throughout the city and cost Dinkins his re-election bid. “Of course I wish it never happened,” Dinkins writes. “But I never did, nor will I start now, blame anyone else for what occurred on my watch.”
A frank, unique look at the many challenges in New York City politics.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61039-301-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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
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
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