Talk about bad luck: seven weeks before the devastating attack on the World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein had signed a 99-year lease to manage the property. Yet in this detailed and candid account, the author shows how grit and persistence and a healthy dose of diplomacy helped create not only an extraordinary tribute to those who died on 9/11 but also reshaped the neighborhood into a vibrant place to work and live. New York governor Andrew Cuomo does not come off well, and neither does New Jersey governor Chris Christie, with their mutual pique directed at Mayor Mike Bloomberg for his expert management of the memorial site itself. And don’t get Silverstein started on the Port Authority, whose officials, in his opinion, were in way over their head. Were all these headaches for Silverstein worth it? Head to the memorial, preferably on a late-summer morning with a sky as blue as the day the towers fell, and gaze at the names of the perished around the two underground pools, both with cascading waterfalls and located on the exact footprints of the two towers, and you will find your answer.
For some, it’s hard to think of New York City’s northern borough without recalling Ogden Nash’s famous line “The Bronx? No Thonx!” Ian Frazier, whose previous books include Travels in Siberia and Great Plains, has been walking around the Bronx for 15 years, and beautifully proves in this book that sometimes the best stories in the world are a subway ride away. Jonas Bronck, who bought the land from local Lenape tribes, may be the name on the door, but the Bronx is about immigrants, the Yankees, the Young Lords, Grandmaster Flash, the worst neighborhood crime of Robert Moses (that would be the Cross Bronx Expressway), and the very brief residency of Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik leader who lived in a fifth-floor apartment on Vyse Avenue in 1917 before heading back to Russia to help lead the revolution. Paradise Bronx is as much about its people as it is about its history and its streets, and Frazier turns the borough’s resurrection from its ravaged 60s and 70s into a feel-good story that is not in the least bit sappy.
We all know the names of the famed explorers from 500 years ago: Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Cortés, Balboa, Magellan, Pizarro. What you may not have known is that the journals of these and other mariners were closely held, thus denying Europeans as full a picture as possible of what the “New World” and Asia were like. Along came a Venetian geographer named Giovambattista Ramusio, a learned and circumspect man who through all manner of guile collected as many journals and accounts as he could and published them anonymously in the 1550s. The impact was a bit like discovering that the ranch house you live in is actually a five-story Victorian. Andrea di Robilant does his own clever sleuthing to shed light on both Ramusio and his achievement, and the result is the tale of a geographer as thrilling as those of the explorers themselves.
This biography of Russia’s greatest composer has many virtues, but its main asset may be to blow up the popular idea of Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky as perpetually in crisis. To produce as much music as he did during his 53 years required a disciplined focus that is not usually available to tortured souls. What Simon Morrison does brilliantly is to place the composer and his music within the context of his times, while also portraying the man himself as both more complex and joyful than the caricature suggests. As for Tchaikovsky’s premonitions of death in his latter years? Living in a city like St. Petersburg in the midst of a cholera epidemic surely explains some of that. It is that disease that killed him, not suicide.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIL
