However, Caro's tremendous, artfully compiled detail, based on dozens of interviews and exhaustive source-hunting, ensure...
At the height of his power Robert Moses was emperor of nearly all New York State public works—bridges, highways, housing, parks, electrical power, the World's Fair and the United Nations—without ever holding elected office.
In his chairmanship of twelve agencies from 1924 to 1968, Moses spent at least 27 billion dollars with immense inefficiency, utter disregard for opponents and maximum reward for friendly banks, contractors and political allies. Caro richly documents his arrogance and vindictiveness, exemplified by his penchant for bulldozing unrelocated residents' homes. At the same time, Caro's fascination with Moses, a prerequisite for writing this 1296-page biography, produces a Last Hurrah undertone right up to Moses' old age: "forgotten to live out his years in bitterness and rage." Moses reached power in a decade when Mussolini's corporatism was praised by such venerable sources as the AFL and the New Republic; and along with his mammoth public spending and chronic lying, Moses replicated tire Fascists' disregard for legality and due process, in a drive for complete personal command. Caro tends to treat Moses' history too personally, without explaining that Moses' World War I civil service reform "idealism" and his later push for highways, conservation and public works expansion reflected general leitmotifs of those political periods. The book views Nelson Rockefeller's 1968 ouster of Moses as a clash of temperaments, for example, without asking whether the Governor's transportation and urban redevelopment reorganization schemes might not have required a new, equally ruthless but lower-profiled species of administrator.
However, Caro's tremendous, artfully compiled detail, based on dozens of interviews and exhaustive source-hunting, ensure that "The Power Broker" will be acclaimed as the definitive monument to Moses, as well as a key study of the web of political figures connected with, and against, Moses' career.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1974
ISBN: 0394480767
Page Count: 1352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1974
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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