After I saw the film, Turn Every Page, which featured the relationship between editor Robert Gottlieb, and the book’s author, Robert Cairo, I decided I had to read this very famous book, and one that I should have read years ago.
It’s massive and somewhat daunting, but once I started, I couldn’t put it down. I write (and used to teach) about environmental politics. This book, which focuses on the career of Robert Moses, can also be viewed as an environmental history of New York City’s built environment: the parks, the highways, the housing developments, and even the playgrounds.
The book is also, as the title suggests, an investigation into one of my favorite topics: how to gain, use, and ultimately abuse power. Moses was brilliant, ruthless, and, in the end, utterly corrupt.
The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro is 'simply one of the best non-fiction books in English of the last forty years' (Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times): a riveting and timeless account of power, politics and the city of New York by 'the greatest political biographer of our times' (Sunday Times); chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time and by the Modern Library as one of the 100 Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century; Winner of the Pulitzer Prize; a Sunday Times Bestseller; 'An outright masterpiece' (Evening Standard)
I love Charles Dickens, so I could not resist this rewriting of my favorite of his novels. At first, however, I found it so bleak that I put it down. When a friend suggested that I should keep going, I decided to pick it back up as an audiobook.
I ended up becoming extremely attached to the various characters in the book, especially Demon. And I saw connections between Kingsolver’s novel and the original David Copperfield, which were made in a way that I thought was brilliant.
I lived in West Virginia for four years, so I appreciated the fact that she had written about an often written-off region of the country. And the book is funny. It’s a rather dark kind of humor, but that’s okay with me.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
I took my bicycle to ride across northern Spain last summer and brought along some Spanish-oriented novels.
Noah Gordon’s book follows the path of a young man whose father and brother are murdered when Queen Isabella decides that all the Jews must be expelled from the country. Fifteen-year-old, Yonah Toledano, sets off on a journey through various parts of Spain, trying to keep one step ahead of the priestly authorities, who, if they catch him, will burn him at the stake.
It's an adventure story. But I also learned a great deal about the operations and cruel applications of the Inquisition. At the Prado Museum in Madrid, I viewed Francisco Goya’s paintings depicting various Inquisition scenes, which drove the novel’s points home even harder.
In the year 1492, the Inquisition has all of Spain in its grip. After centuries of pogrom-like riots encouraged by the Church, the Jews - who have been an important part of Spanish life since the days of the Romans - are expelled from the country by royal edict. Many who wish to remain are intimidated by Church and Crown and become Catholics, but several hundred thousand choose to retain their religion and depart; given little time to flee, some perish even before they can escape from Spain.
Yonah Toledano, the 15-year-old son of a celebrated Spanish silversmith, has seen…
Native Americans have long regarded Onondaga Lake as one of the most sacred spaces in the continent, the place where peace between nations was achieved and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was created.
In the mid-twentieth century, however, it acquired a wholly different reputation as “the most polluted lake in America.”
This book is an environmental history of this complex ecological system, tracking how it was tarnished, the costly efforts to clean it up, and the controversies those efforts generated.
