January 9, 2012
The latest from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist O’Neill (Black Mass, co-authored with Dick Lehr) is not for the politically faint of heart. In this encyclopedic take on Bostonian elections from the late 19th century to the modern era, and associated scandals, civic issues, and cultural collisions, O’Neill focuses on the city’s Dickensian crop of political figures. Among those brought to vivid life are two dueling mayors, the smooth-talking Honey Fitz and the pugnacious James Michael Curley; the ward boss Martin Lomasney, known as “Mahatma” for his impartial ways; and the corrupt attorney Dan Coakley, a “Merlin of the defense bar,” who specialized in a sexual entrapment scheme known as “the badger game.” Tracing Boston’s development through its mayoral administrations also enables O’Neill to survey hot-button issues, including a revitalization plan that leveled low-income neighborhoods, and forced busing to integrate public schools. The narrative is most dynamic when O’Neill expands the discussion to include the social, economic, and national context, but he too often relies on name-checking and score-keeping—a game that will please political junkies, but be lost on novices. Much of the book reads like stitched-together news articles: the facts are sound and the prose tight, but events are recapped without deeper analysis or reflection.
March 1, 2012
A gritty, down-and-dirty saga about the Irish politicos who "ruled Boston for nearly a century," from 1902 to 1993. Pulitzer Prize-winning ex-Boston Globe investigative reporter O'Neill provides a candid look at the political machinations that built, and destroyed, a legendary American city. He begins with the famine ships that arrived with the "bedraggled [Irish] newcomers" who became the scourge of Yankee Boston. These immigrants quickly learned that the only way they could lay claim to "jobs, education [and] religious tolerance" would be through bare-knuckle politics. Boston elected its first Irish mayor in 1884, but O'Neill begins with a portrait of the shrewd and magnetic John "Honey" Fitzgerald, maternal grandfather of John F. Kennedy, who served as mayor from 1906 to 1908 and again from 1910 to 1914. By this time, other ambitious Irishmen, such as the infamous Ward 8 boss Martin Lomasney and the combative Boston Common Councilman (and later four-time mayor) James Michael Curley, were also on the scene. All engaged in cloak-and-dagger political schemes to enhance their power, while Curley unabashedly used his position to enrich himself at the city's expense. As Machiavellian as they were charming, these men brought Boston into the modern era--and to the brink of bankruptcy. Mid-century redeemers such as Mayors John Hynes and John Collins and urban planner Ed Logue brought the city back through programs that renewed parts of the city at the expense of creating enmity between numerous social and ethnic groups. They left Mayor Kevin White the unenviable task of guiding Boston through the desegregation crisis of the 1970s. Eager to put the city's tumultuous past behind him, White focused on making Boston "world-class," while the last "mayoral mick," Ray Flynn, attempted to make a city now increasingly divided between rich and poor livable for all. A splendidly detailed great American epic.
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February 15, 2012
A streetwise chronicler of Boston's past century of politics, O'Neill surveys its history through the city's mayors. Most were of Irish descent, including John Fitzgerald, James Curley, Kevin White, and Raymond Flynn. Those and other sons of Hibernia reached the top in elections whose issues and atmosphere O'Neill recounts with ward-level knowledge of Boston. Couched in urban argot, O'Neill's stories of votes, contracts, and graft arise from the background of the city's ethnic geography and the class frictions between its Protestant Yankee elite and the IrishBeacon Hill Brahmins versus South Boston Sullivans. One of the latter's champions, Curley, is easily the most outlandish politician in O'Neill's gallery; after decades of his forthright corruption, by 1950 the dilapidated city needed a new direction. It came in the form of reform mayors advised by Harvard academics, who pushed downtown redevelopment and urban renewal that, whatever their advisability, aggravated ethnic-class divisions, which exploded in the 1970s' intense conflict over court-ordered compulsory school desegregation. Author of Black Mass (2000), an account of mobster Whitey Bulger, O'Neill will rivet readers who relish Boston and urban affairs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)