Rudy!: An Investigative Biography Of Rudy Giuliani

by Wayne Barrett, Adam Fifield

Rudy Guiliani. New York City's Mayor. America's Number One Cop. A municipal superhero who needs no phone booth. A politician of astonishing complexity whose full story has never been told. Until now. Guiliani has assumed mythic proportions, the can-do emblem of the new urban politics. He has been heralded as the ultimate turn-around artist - projecting himself as the reformer who single-handedly salvaged a crime-ridden and blighted New York. From his days in the Eighties as the Michael Milken-busting U.S. Attorney of Manhattan to his current purge of hundreds of thousands from his city's welfare rolls, Giuliani has targeted rich and poor with the same relentless certitude. This investigative biography starts with the college kid who confided his presidential dream to his girlfriend and practiced future campaign speeches in front of her at home. It analyzes his substantial impact as U.S. Attorney, badly wounding the Mafia, ransacking the white collared halls of Wall Street and forever changing the face of New York politics. It looks at his celebrated crime reduction and other achievements through a new lens, highlighting the single-mindedness that has made Giuliani one of America's most important and controversial figures. With two marriages as troubled and secretive as his family history, Giuliani is on every New Yorker's therapeutic couch, stirring feelings as intense as the ones that visibly boil inside of him. Though he has become a national legend, his re-election total in 1997 was the lowest in seventy-four years. Wayne Barrett, co-author of the bestselling City for Sale , draws on twenty years of reporting on Giuliani to bring us the most comprehensive and newsbreaking biography of a man of giant contradictions and unpredictable expectations.

Genres: Nonfiction, New York, Biography

512 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 2000

About the author

Wayne Barrett was an American journalist. He worked as an investigative reporter and senior editor for The Village Voice for 37 years, and was known as a leading investigative journalist focused on power and politics in the United States. He is known as New York City's "foremost muckraker."
“Our credo must be the exposure of the plunderers, the steerers, the wirepullers, the bosses, the brokers, the campaign givers and takers,” Barrett once said to journalism students at his alma mater, Columbia University. “So I say: Stew, percolate, pester, track, burrow, besiege, confront, damage, level, care.”

Reviews

[Kathe Murnyack · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very hard read. Full of statistics, very repetitive not worth the bother.

[Quentyn Daniels · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book months before 9-11 because I wanted to get an idea of the man that turned around NYC from the hellhole that it was. Yeah, I learned that he's a guy that you probably wouldn't want to work for, but not many can dispute what he's done.

[Joe Marsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Big fan of the former mayor of New York, interesting novel detailing his life

[Rey · Rating 4 out of 5]

the possibilities are endless, i could be mayor? perhaps