 by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author's program note. I think I should tell you. I've known the subject of this article for donkey's years and never was heard a discouraging word and the skies were not cloudy all day... until now. For now I am going to try even Larry's legendary patience and good nature... by giving him blunt advice about his new 219 page book "Turmoil and Transition in Boston: A Political Memoir From the Busing Era" (Hamilton Books) . It is the advice his editor should have given him... that is if that editor wanted to sell books and make the always personable DiCara what he never was, the toast of tout le monde and especially denizens of the great city he has known, loved, served.... and now unforgivably bored, the greatest sin in publishing (or in any relationship of love.) For love can be cruel, bitter, double-dealing, tumultuous, soaring, lyric, bathetic, tearful, vengeful, ennobling but it must never ever be dull, taken for granted, as comfy and predictable as an old shoe. Upon this immutable rock any number of "good" relationships has foundered.... for the human animal craves excitement in its enthralling amours, ardor, coy fig leaves removed, roller coasters that scare us witless, take our breath away and leave us gasping and in awe, begging for more. Alas and alack, none of this satisfying froth not a sentence, not a single word is to be found in these arid pages... and thus readers will punish poor old Larry by doing the most hurtful thing they can do to any pedestrian author... the coup de grace by ignoring him, his words already providing more (unnecessary) detritus at the very bottom of the slough of despond. And there is nothing sadder and more terminal than that as Larry has now come, too late to know. Determining which book to write. People who will never write a book are prone to crow about the book they could write... if only they condescended to write it. "Yeah, I could write a book about my life," they brag... but fortunately never do since even the most riveting of lives can pall if the presentation is wrong... as it most assuredly is here. In a nutshell here is what DiCara's book is about... a once great city, mired in economic miasma, burdened by searing racial hatreds, its bus-riding children used as political pawns by all, erupts into violence, rage, bitter enmities with the worst aspects of humanity on display for all the world to see. The city on the hill indeed...the progressive values of liberal revolution mocked, deep beliefs deeply held, viciously ridiculed; the incense of hypocrisy wafted by every sanctimonious, self-serving statement, in time for the 5 p.m. news. It was a bloody and abusive struggle, a struggle that exhibited the worst... and the best... of us... again testing the depths to which humanity so often descends... and the heights to which good men and women might ascend, once they decide to confront the evil that would otherwise prevail. Larry has taken this cauldron of possibilities, boiled away each and every aspect of appalling fascination, ensured that not a scintilla beyond dry fact remains... and presented this to a world that is justifiably dismissive. As author Gertrude Stein,herself a citizen of Harvard, of Boston who yet memorably rose to speak to and confront the wider world, said, "There is no there there." It is a judgement of discernment... and unanswerable finality. DiCara, hapless executioner. Memoirs, the most personal of histories, must titillate, amuse, astonish, reveal, astound, bewilder, boggle, confound, daze, dumfound, flabbergast, overwhelm, shock, startle, stun, stupefy, surprise, floor, stagger, blow away, bowl over and otherwise capture the reader and his full attention. DiCara's memoirs do none of these things, thereby diminishing the story and its potential impact at every turn of the tale. Consider this. During the '70s, the years principally covered in this book, Boston's schools and the children and young adults within them were the targets, the prizes to be won (or lost) as your side advanced (or didn't). DiCara, here handicapped by the fact that he's an attorney with the attorney's almost manic determination to write facts and nothing more, makes a positive fetish out of removing every single feature of potential interest, leaving behind nothing but the facts. These, however, no doubt accurate and necessary, a helluva lot of work in the discovery, organizing, and presentation, are, after DiCara's dedicated desiccation, nothing more than husks, every drop of interest gone, gone, irrevocably gone. Larry, of course, whose term papers at Harvard were always in on time, always followed the instructor's wishes and admonitions to the letter, and never, ever let the sordid business of creativity interfere with the high matter of getting an "A"; Larry, I say, will no doubt fight this charge with tenacious logic and a willingness to cut the kinds of deals attorneys do. But that won't wash here, for you see he is, pure and simple, an immaculately dressed, sonorously intoning, paid by the hour executioner. A pithy anecdote, a trenchant observation, even a single kiss, enjoyed (or not) at the time, rendered with wit and indiscretion for the ages, would have shown him the way and put him on the Via Appia towards the goal he most desires and cannot get here, hordes of book-buying, book-reading folk, beloved of every author, good, bad, or indifferent. Someone should have told him books on urban sociology never sell, not even when the author is and always has been the single best boy on our often scoffing planet. Oh, Larry, why didn't you call me before penning a single disabling word? You had a handful of trumps and threw them all away. See for yourself... Anecdotage. It is now time for you to learn just what Larry DiCara did that made a good book possible. In 1971 he became Boston's youngest city councillor. Aged just 22, fresh out of Harvard, he won a startling 61,000 votes and immediately became that hottest of properties, the coming man, the proven vote getter, the man who could be, given Boston's notorious political history and environment, a credible candidate for any office in the land, an eye always cocked on the White House itself. It was thrilling, a dream come true, "Hail to the Chief" and all that rattling around in the capacious brain; for though the man was physically shorter than most... what he wanted and worked strenuously to get was gigantic. But there was one problem. He not only had to keep winning. He had to keep astonishing the local politicians and community leaders who were quick to pick up "His excellency, the next governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts"... and faster still to discard a talent once red-hot and scintillating, the stuff of history, now shopworn and fading. It wasn't just a tall order; it was virtually impossible given the toxic environment, for the minute you said "busing is good" you lost half the electorate, and vice versa. He could (and did) get re-elected, even rising to the eminence of president of the city council, but the dazzle factor, so heady, so inspiring, so satisfying, died early and forever. It was the devil's own conundrum and through the short office-holding years ahead DiCara never solved it. Thus his career was literally thrown under a bus... leaving him forever tainted; the most amiable of men with charm to burn trapped between Olympic level haters on the one hand, vulgar disdain their specialty, and social activists on the other; the kind of people who love humanity and despise people. It was inhospitable, punishing territory for Larry whose desire to be loved (not just liked) by everyone is obvious from the first page of his book, palpable, and more than a little sad. It is this all-important aspect that makes writing a truly great and rollicking book out of the question. You cannot tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and please all the people you write about. God has not yet delivered the ingenious author who can pull that off... and DiCara isn't even close. Thus to please he must delete everything that would even remotely disquiet, irritate or anger. And because he has been completely successful in this particular, his book was DOA. No kiss, nothing to tell. Geraldine Ferraro et al. Memoirs, of course, must be strewn with names, lots of names, important names. Here Larry got it right. He's got names alright, but tells us absolutely nothing of interest about any of them. Geraldine Ferraro, in 1984 the first major party female vice presidential candidate, visits his home. This is what he says about this famously indiscrete, voluble woman; she was "delighted to be back in a neighborhood that reminded her of her own District in New York." That's it, there ain't no more; an opportunity not merely forever lost but as clear an indication as possible why. What about his mentor Michael S. Dukakis, former Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate; the man who asked him to be his lieutenant governor? "On paper, Michael and I were not terribly different, though he was older than I. We shared ethnic backgrounds, progressive views, and a great education." That is Larry's vapid take on the man who, with just a few more votes, would have been the most powerful person on Earth. There was well and truly no there there. And it wasn't because he lacked for models. There is "Kell" (1977) by Jack Flannery; "Mackerell by Moonlight" (1999) by William Weld. And, of course, the big daddy of the genre, Edwin O'Connor's classic novel "The Last Hurrah" (1956), which Larry admits was "well-thumbed" by him; well-thumbed perhaps but not remotely understood. These authors, each a seasoned, sarcastic, political game loving maven, with scores to pay off as cleverly and painfully as possible, fought for our attention just as they had once fought for our votes and the spoils and deference only winning brings. Why didn't DiCara follow their proven path? Easy. He didn't want to tread on the toes of anyone, lest they withheld their admiration and love. And so one of the best of boys penned one of the worst of books in which he did the unimaginable, rendering Boston's "take no prisoners" politics, messy, murderous, mesmerizing, as dull as Orlando's. For this there is no pardon possible, no pardon at all. But there is a tune, a song Larry surely knows. It's "More Than a Feeling". It took an excruciating five years for writer Tom Scholz to complete and was recorded by his band Boston in 1976, Larry's heyday. Find it now in any search engine and hear these apposite words, "So many people have come and gone/ Their faces fade as the years go by/ Yet I still recall as I wander on/ As clear as the sun in the summer sky." All Larry had to do was tell their stories as exuberantly as they had lived them and he would have had the resounding succes de scandale, the succes d'estime he has always craved. Oh, Larry, why didn't you call me....? |
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