The kind of successfully fluid story that could be written only by someone who has seen and connected the dots, studied the...
A blistering and memorable portrait of a man and a city whose politics went bad a long time ago and stayed that way, from the Pulitzer-winning Providence Journal investigative reporter.
It is joked, writes Stanton, that Providence, Rhode Island, was the “America's first safe house,” a haven for freethinkers and the persecuted in Puritan New England. But the colony's wide-open mores also made it, as Cotton Mather so elegantly noted, the fag end of creation. By the time Buddy Cianci became mayor, for the first time, in 1974, the city was understood to be a hotbed of political corruption, ably sketched out by Stanton in a profile of Raymond Patriarca, mob boss and unelected mayor. Though Cianci ran on an anti-corruption ticket, he soon learned that “once you came down from the East Side and crossed the river into the rest of Providence, you needed political grease and muscle. You had to cut deals. You needed an organization.” In Providence, the blueprint was already in place and Cianci hewed to the line, namely scams, shakedowns, bribes, and kickbacks, while also demonstrating his willingness to go beyond the standard ego strutting of politics into something scarier, a taste for cruelty that got him uprooted from the mayoralty when he was convicted of assault in a particularly nasty act of mayhem. Six years later, he's back in office, and back at doing what he does best: “running a criminal enterprise out of the mayor's office that, during the 1990s, had extorted more that two million dollars in kickbacks for jobs, contracts, and favors.” From the brightly illuminated picture of the city Stanton has created, that can only have been the tip of the big berg that lurks off the radar. Buddy's now in the clink.
The kind of successfully fluid story that could be written only by someone who has seen and connected the dots, studied the resulting picture for years and from many perspectives, observed the changes, and even sensed them.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50780-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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