A compelling personal account of a uniquely American comeback.
One of the nation’s most successful real estate magnates details what it took to rebuild and revitalize the 9/11 site.
As he recounts, Silverstein had secured a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers less than two months before 9/11. In this first-person account of his business success and navigation of the bureaucratic maze known as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the author explains how he used his knowledge, authority, and acumen to follow through on his nearly instantaneous decision to rebuild and revitalize the site and properly memorialize those murdered in the atrocity. In addition to amply demonstrating his entrepreneurial and political adroitness, Silverstein displays a talent for making the complex and high-stakes game of New York City commercial real estate—and the associated legal and insurance wrangling that 9/11 made even more difficult—surprisingly interesting. His seemingly good and decent nature shines through his prose, as does considerable wisdom gleaned from a wildly successful career that many times looked as if it would plunge beyond the precipice—but was bolstered by loyal friends, associates, and, most of all, his devoted and tough-as-nails wife, Klara. Silverstein’s poignant and heartfelt description of what was lost—and what endured—in the wake of 9/11, including the anguished resolve to keep moving forward and weighing whether to rebuild or consecrate the entire site as hallowed ground, will resonate with anyone who experienced that tumultuous period. “The precise details are buried deep in my mind,” he writes. “Even decades later they are apparently too painful to relive fully.” At the same time, the author provides a deeper perspective and understanding to younger readers who did not experience it. Throughout, Silverstein writes with panache, wit, and grace, and his is a story worth savoring.
A compelling personal account of a uniquely American comeback.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780525658962
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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