by James L. Hecht ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A sensible and optimistic consideration of the globe’s prospects for success.
A man reflects on his life and draws on his eclectic experiences to discuss the world’s future.
Hecht (Rubles and Dollars: Strategies for Doing Business in the Soviet Union, 1991, etc.) grew up in New York City, and learned powerful lessons about the value of working hard and overcoming adversity while living through the Depression. After a stint as a copyboy at a newspaper, he went to Cornell to study chemical engineering. His education was interrupted by World War II—he spent nearly two years in the military—and he ended up attending Georgia Tech and then Yale. While at Yale, Hecht met his future wife, Amy—a day he affectionately describes as the most important of his life—and before he decamped to Buffalo to start a new job, he proposed marriage to her. A significant portion of this book is a conventional memoir, recounting a life of work, family, and public service. But seamlessly interspersed throughout these remembrances are brief reflections on a wide spectrum of global problems and issues in public policy. For example, the author recalls his experience serving as the president of Housing Opportunities Made Equal in Buffalo for five years, and what he learned about the timely issue of low-income housing and racial disparity. (He wrote another book on this subject: Because It is Right: Integration in Housing, 1970.) After discussing his military service, Hecht recommends the creation of a Universal National Service. Sometimes, his unconventional perspective is refreshingly provocative: he examines the tensions between Israel and Palestine in terms of the former’s need to territorially control an aquifer that provides a significant amount of its water supply. And, after multiple trips to the Soviet Union, Hecht encouraged a kind of commercial détente. Ultimately, the author optimistically envisions the creation of a world government, possible partially because of a resurgence of religious belief globally. This is a thoughtful meditation, and Hecht skillfully mines his own experiences for contemporary wisdom. As a whole, the volume lacks a fully coherent structure, and seems to meander sometimes from disparate topic to topic. But this remains an inspiring book—Hecht suffered two extraordinary tragedies in his life: both of his sons died. Out of deep loss, he found the will to improve the world he inhabits, and this memoir is a testament to that philanthropically charged mission.
A sensible and optimistic consideration of the globe’s prospects for success.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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