A gossipy, character-driven saga suggesting that the spoiled rich are their own worst enemies.
A prolific biographer of the rich and infamous, Oppenheimer (Madoff with the Money, 2009, etc.) digs into five generations of the Johnson family, “the most dysfunctional family in the Fortune 500.”
Founded in 1887 by three Johnson brothers, Johnson & Johnson became synonymous with products such as Band-Aids and baby powder. The author occasionally reveals corporate strategies and secrets but mostly focuses on the members of the extended Johnson family, detailing their mind-boggling personal wealth. Hundreds of names come and go throughout the narrative, with Oppenheimer concentrating on 15 blood relatives, their spouses and business partners. The book is largely a fast-paced chronicle of births, courtings, marriages, divorces, estrangements, bitter lawsuits, drug and alcohol abuses, crimes, memorable deaths and other unpleasantness. After the first generation, members of the Johnson family found it difficult to decipher whether outsiders cared about them for their personalities or only for their wealth. That kind of doubt can cause havoc with emotional stability, as Oppenheimer demonstrates with frequent salacious details of the lives of his protagonists. As is the case with his other unauthorized biographies, the author usually reveals little about whether his information derives from primary or secondary sources. The writing is clear but often painful to read due to the use of clichés and trite metaphors. One Johnson family member emerges as the chief subject: Robert Wood Johnson IV, a great-grandson of a company founder. Oppenheimer uses the nickname “Woody” to identify the protagonist, frequently coming back to his fundraising for Republican presidential candidates and his ownership of the New York Jets.
A gossipy, character-driven saga suggesting that the spoiled rich are their own worst enemies.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-66211-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
