Word: booker
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...Newark Mayor Cory Booker, the political phenom who was most likely to be introduced as the "first black President" at speeches before we actually elected the first black President, had accepted a chance to run Barack Obama's new Office of Urban Affairs earlier this year, could anyone have blamed him? After all, Newark's mayors - Hugh Addonizio, Sharpe James - tend to end up in the jailhouse, not the White House. What could be more tactical for a young, telegenic Rhodes scholar with infinite political potential? A home among the Georgetown salons, minutes from the national talk-show studios...
Despite all the rational reasons to pursue the position, Booker turned down the President. "That job is not playing to my strengths," says the mayor while sitting on a couch in his city-hall office. It's closing in on 8 o'clock the night before the three-day July 4 weekend. He has just wrapped up a meeting with his police director and a conference call with the local electric company, but Booker, 40, doesn't know when to quit working. Or talking. Some politicians ramble on in paragraphs; Booker pontificates in pages. Chapters, even. "That's not playing...
...Brennan. It was a place that, with its strategic location in the Northeast urban corridor and assets like a thriving port, had the potential of Los Angeles. But since the '67 riots and the epic flight that followed, Newark (pop. 280,000) has been searching for its elusive renaissance. Booker, a black kid from the lily-white suburbs of northern New Jersey, has promised to deliver it and prove that an educated, technocratic outsider can rewrite the rules for how America's most challenged cities are governed...
...Booker bio is irresistible - and familiar: he arrived in Newark fresh out of Stanford, Oxford and Yale Law, passing up riches to save a poor city. He moved into a decrepit Newark public-housing project, which has since been torn down, and was elected to the Newark city council at age 29. In 2006, at 37, he became mayor. To his supporters, who include A+ listers like Oprah Winfrey, Bon Jovi and Brad Pitt, plus an élite cadre of Wall Street and Silicon Valley scions, Booker's self-sacrificial tale is heroic. To his critics, Booker is still...
Short-listed for the man Booker Prize for four out of his six novels, of which one, The Remains of the Day, won in 1989, Kazuo Ishiguro is the undisputed genius of vagueness, threshold states and constantly shifting surfaces. Now he has turned his attention to the short story for the first time. Nocturnes, subtitled "Five Stories of Music and Nightfall," was written, Ishiguro said in a recent interview, as a unified, organic project from beginning to end. It is much like a novel and unlike most short-story collections, which tend to be a gathering of work published elsewhere...