Revealing memoir from a significant 20th-century business leader.
The banker who famously helped to save New York City from bankruptcy recalls his career as a leading Wall Street dealmaker.
A self-described “capitalist with a liberal conscience,” 82-year-old Rohatyn (Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now, 2009, etc.) remains an advisor to the investment bank Lazard Frères, where founder Andre Meyer first hired him in 1948. Ultimately rising to managing director, Rohatyn spent more than 40 years with Lazard, participating in major mergers and acquisitions, including headline-makers like the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, the RCA merger with GE and numerous acquisitions for ITT, whose chair, Harold Geneen, was his mentor. A staunch Democrat, he served as President Clinton’s Ambassador to France, the nation his Polish-Jewish family had fled 60 years earlier to escape the Nazis. In this well-written memoir, the author says dumb luck—certainly not his lackluster record as a Middlebury College physics major—led him to investment banking, about which he knew nothing. For many years, he writes, he acted naively, even stupidly on occasion, notably at a grueling 1972 Congressional hearing into ITT affairs, where he appeared without an attorney. He writes at length about his most rewarding success—resolving New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s as chair of the New York Municipal Assistance Corp.—and provides some wonderful scenes: Rohatyn calling Attorney General John Mitchell nightly, to report on the state of Wall Street, only to listen to a drunken Martha Mitchell ranting about left-wing pinkos and Vietnam; Rohatyn roaming deserted Manhattan streets at 2 a.m. strategizing with Geneen; Rohatyn racing from Elaine’s with New York Gov. Carey to make a private phone call at a nearby bar, where a patron said, “ ‘You look like Hugh Carey,’ ” and the governor replied, “ ‘Are you kidding? What would the governor be doing in a dump like this?’ ” The author also offers tips for effective dealing: In a financial crisis, most data are probably wrong, but you must act, and you must rely on people who might very well have caused the problem.
Revealing memoir from a significant 20th-century business leader.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8196-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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