We suspect you’ll be hearing a lot about Fred Siegel’s new Rudy book, which we mentioned in our story this week. He’s reading from it today at a Manhattan Institute event, and we suspect that’s just the start of the kind of media blitz anything remotely connected to America’s Mayor inspires.
Anyway, Siegel has a website, where you can see the eerie yellow cover art and get a taste of Siegel’s argument, which includes some defenses and explanations of aspects of Rudy that you don’t often see defended: Brooklyn museum battles, building the bunker at 7 World Trade, and even, to some extent, the heavily criticized policing that led up to the Diallo shooting.
His basic case is that Rudy took on the people Ed Koch used to call “poverty pimps,” and that much of the conflict was inevitable. This book, and an, er, more critical collection Rob Polner edited for Soft Skull Press, mean that some sort of conversation is emerging about Rudy as Mayor, kind of a relief from the exclusive focus on 9/11 in the discussion of a guy who, after all, ran the city for eight years.
