by Lloyd Handwerker with Gil Reavill ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2016
A well-made, evenhanded, sometimes cautionary story of business, told with the affection and exasperation of an insider.
Everyone’s a wiener in this frank account by a scion of hot dog nobility.
There was no such thing as “fast food,” documentarian Handwerker asserts, before his grandfather Nathan came on the scene, having emigrated from Galicia and made his way somehow to Coney Island. There, in 1916, after proving himself a hard worker and excellent businessman in the service of other immigrants, he founded a fast-food restaurant that would specialize in hot dogs—more specifically, Nathan’s Famous dogs, the namesake of his eatery. In time, writes the author, Nathan’s Famous would be the province of stars like Jacqueline Kennedy and Frank Sinatra, hailed by proto-foodies and the hipster crowd of the day. However, he insists, “the place was never about celebrities. It was democratic through and through.” Nathan paid well, gave generous bonuses, and otherwise took care of his workers, and employees rewarded him with loyal, decadeslong service. That was all very old-fashioned, of course, and things began to turn south when the old ways began to be replaced with the recommendations of advisers, consultants, and bankers. The beginning of the end comes toward the end of Handwerker’s lively book, when Nathan organizes a stock sale that makes the family millions but introduces jealousies, conspiracies, and other headaches. The end of the end—and the lamented end of the Nathan’s Famous dog as the world once knew it—came with the corporatization of the humble wiener, bringing even more money into play but taking most of the simple pleasure out of a visit to the beach. “The Nathan’s Famous is nowadays more of a licensing business,” writes Handwerker, bringing the snack to grocery stores far and wide, if without any of Nathan Handwerker’s dogged attention to every detail.
A well-made, evenhanded, sometimes cautionary story of business, told with the affection and exasperation of an insider.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07454-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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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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