Maddening if you’re not mega-wealthy, and a vigorous, righteously indignant book that would do Jane Jacobs proud.
The Big Apple is morphing into a class-war amusement park for the very rich. Thus this irate argument for remaking it into a city for the rest of us.
Like climate change, writes pseudonymous New York Daily News editorialist and blogger Moss, hypergentrification is both a fact and a human-caused artifact and, therefore, can be halted. The hypergentrification of New York, in particular, “gentrification on speed, shot up with free-market capitalism,” is producing a safe, arid, sterile, uniform city, a place in which the old bohemian mecca has been overwhelmed by “luxury condo towers, rampant greed, and suburbanization.” If that seems a touch hyperbolic, then the author is happy to own up to the adjective, noting, derisively, that New York may not be altogether dead, if “dying” is a substitute word that will make his critics happier. Moss traces this process to the urban renewal programs of the New Deal, when tenements were scraped away in the apparent hope that poverty would disappear with them. Robert Moses “flattened neighborhoods where the vast majority of people were working class and nonwhite,” while Ed Koch ushered in the “me decade” of the 1980s, Rudy Giuliani swept the streets by force in the ’90s, and Michael Bloomberg oversaw the post–9/11 transformation of the city into the province of the very rich in a program that Moss calls “the apotheosis of neoliberal ideology.” Happily, the jargon mostly gives way to plainspoken language of anger at the disappearance of places like the old Times Square, where visitors are now “anesthetized in the greasy glow” of fast food and big-screen TVs. The sitting president figures in the tale, too, as a public-funds moocher of the first water. Moss closes with notes on remaking New York so that less moneyed, less well-connected residents enjoy the same “right to the city” as his greedy villains.
Maddening if you’re not mega-wealthy, and a vigorous, righteously indignant book that would do Jane Jacobs proud.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243969-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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