An inspiring story of a defiant woman and the landscape she loved.
How a public-private partnership revitalized Manhattan’s famed park.
In 1980, Rogers (Green Metropolis: The Extraordinary Landscapes of New York City as Nature, History, and Design, 2016, etc.), as the first Central Park administrator, founded the Central Park Conservancy, a nonprofit corporation whose mission was to rescue the park from a “dire condition” of deterioration and return it to a state of scenic beauty and clean, safe recreation. Decades of neglect, coupled with the use of the park for “mass events and bizarre happenings,” had resulted in crumbling buildings, eroded slopes, graffiti-emblazoned walls and sculptures, and trampled vegetation. Tourists were told to avoid the park, which had a reputation for being “dangerous and scary.” Rogers looked back to the park’s picturesque past, embracing the aesthetic of 19th-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who transformed “a ragged 843-acre wasteland” into “a masterpiece of landscape design and paragon of social beneficence” in a mere 15 years. Her task was daunting: She had “no authority over park workers, no city funds to hire new ones, and no way to reform existing union rules linked to narrowly defined civil service job titles.” Private support was essential, and Rogers identifies with gratitude three early benefactors, the “Great Park Ladies” Brooke Astor, Iphigene Sulzberger, and Lucy Moses. By the time Rogers left her position in 1995, the Conservancy had donated more than $100 million of private money to restoring the park, and the organization became a model for other public-private partnerships. Besides offering a historical overview, Rogers documents the challenges she faced from city administrators and private individuals. Bird-watchers, for example, once mounted a vicious campaign when the Conservancy planned to thin out some trees, and a proposed memorial to John Lennon was saved only because of the flexibility and generosity of Yoko Ono. Rogers learned that effective leadership required the three Ps—patience, passion, and persistence—as well as power, politics, and “the purse.”
An inspiring story of a defiant woman and the landscape she loved.Pub Date: May 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3355-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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 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
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