Word: lupo
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True to his word, the murderer struck again last week, creeping up behind a couple parked on a tree-shaded street near a disco-théque in the borough of Queens and firing four shots from his .44-caliber Charter Arms "Bulldog." Though Judy Placido, 17, and Salvatore Lupo, 20, his tenth and eleventh victims, were wounded, both miraculously survived. But the latest, and most publicized, attack tightened the grip of fear on neighborhoods in Queens and in The Bronx, where the bizarre, psychopathic killer has chosen his targets...
Massachusetts' remaining Yankees--the Sargents and the Saltonstalls--fare no better, as their isolated indifference and calculated impotence is attacked. Lupo sees the Yankees as content to control the city through its finances, operating from plush State Street bank offices, escaping to North Shore farmhouses and summer homes on the Cape. In one of the more effective vignettes in the book, Lupo juxtaposes a Republican-sponsored cocktail party in placid Dover with the frantic, non-stop efforts of Kevin White to cool the city down...
Kevin White, mayor since 1967, dominates the narrative of the busing crisis. Lupo focuses on White, his staff and their concerns and problems in coordinating Phase One. White emerges as a hero of sorts, vulnerable politically, abandoned by the state government, and eventually betrayed by President Ford (in Ford's infamous press conference--televised nationally--where he as much as told Southie its actions were right). Because of Lupo's access to normally off-the-record meetings between White and his staff, Liberty's Chosen Home also offers a case-study of civic decision-making--although at times the Mayor...
...Lupo clearly is partial to White and to the hard-nosed liberal politics of pragmatism that White practices. That partisanship unfortunately blinds Lupo to some of White's flaws and leads to some questionable assertions--that White's national aspirations were killed by his stance during the busing crisis rather than by the allegations of corruption made during the White-Timilty mayoral race. And Lupo prefers not to dwell on the way Garrity has taken control of the Boston school system, removing it from the jurisdiction of the Board of Education and White's office...
...Lupo's thesis of suburban prejudice and class differences as key factors in delaying needed social change makes sense, not only for Boston, but for other American cities. Boston, often cited as a "liveable" city, faces white flight, a narrowing tax base, a degenerating school system and the same economic problems (unemployment, loss of business) plaguing the rest of New England. Lupo asks, quite rightly, "If such a place is allowed to flirt so closely with disaster, then what can the message be for the great urban centers of this republic?" Liberty's Chosen Home offers no master plan...