This is a wonderful, amusing, pleasurable, inspiring autobiography of an American idealist's experiences, insights, and contributions over an 80 year span.
Adding ethics to the American dream can create a terrific, significant adventure to share with many like-minded, and wishing to be like-minded, souls. This charming read takes you through the youth of one not-waiting-around, but instead finding joy in creating make-do innovative Bronx street games, getting ALL of the autographs from the most famous baseball team of his day, earning his way at the family candy shop and in summers at the Catskills, plus a lot more. Meanwhile he gathers street smarts and strength in an incredibly diverse working class immigrant community. Challenged, meeting each day with an eye to embracing its fortuitous opportunities, he is on task. All of this culminated in a BA, Law degree and a year clerkship with a Federal judge.
With the basics in hand, he finds himself attracted to “confronting America’s Achilles heel-Bigotry” in the rising waves of social challenges and transformations of the Sixties and onward. His curiosity, talent and youthful experience led to joining the fight for civil rights and working for better housing and innovative communities. He did this by identifying his talents and how and where to use them. His basic strategy was to find programs that meant something to him and either build great teams or join them to create and innovate new projects finding real solutions. Through these mutual efforts, he demonstrated how facing entrenched social inequalities with new social infrastructures could be successful, and in the meantime he developed relationships that grew into years of many good friends and accomplishments.
For many years, this idealist walks an evolving path of social activism, along the way adding bricks and mortar of to housing, organizations, new US government social action agencies, education. It was not boring. Continuing abroad with the tools and success he had accumulated, Al went on to share these useful strategies and ideas in USAID projects in the countries of the Post-Soviet states. I in spite of a plethora of obstacles, this aid was directed to new and repurposed housing in a variety of locations. After several years, he moved on to Indonesia working on integrative businesses projects to connecting Indonesian manufacturing companies with successful western business such as Rolls-Royce.
This author does not neglect a number of amusing R&R side trips along the way, such as birding in Myanmar and Papua, highlights of being wined and dined in Paris, lecturing at Oxford and riding camels in the silence of the Jordanian desert. Peppered with amusing accounts, these sojourns expand the author's innovative perspective as a world traveler growing in the understanding diverse cultures. A very flexible, imaginative mind is a huge asset in meeting challenging work forces in countries deeply steeped in corruption. Sometimes, it means holding bakshish to a rate where success for all concerned can be a viable outcome. Since childhood, he began learning how to bring ethics and a sense of humor and fun in multi-ethnic situations and also inject a spirit of joy in making it work for everybody. His adult career built on this base, he was able to assist fabricate bridges necessary for the growth and well being of the thousands of people and their programs.
And finally, the author is not afraid to expose the reality of what these pursuits brought in wear and tear, and their cost to his personal life along the way. Through the flow of the book he touches on these shadows and how they develop and eventually resolve. These reflections fill out an important part of the journey, the chiaroscuro of a very wide range view and experiences. Facing them head on as honestly and clearly as he can, gives added dimension and clarity to a very interesting, extraordinary life.
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Top reviews from other countries
Hamish Daniel
A story worth telling of a changing life
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 25, 2019