Cool, dry, deadly biography of billionaire sportsman/power- broker Jack Kent Cooke, by book-rookie Havill, former president of a public-relations firm. Starting from barely middle-class origins in Hamilton, Ontario, Cooke displayed a remarkable range of abilities and enough confidence in them more or less to ignore school. Good-looking, feisty, charming, with real musical and athletic talent, the young Cooke, Havill makes clear, was also driven and daunting. The life of this man who has revered F. Scott Fitzgerald sparkles like a Gatsby party crowded with the rich and famous—Leslie Stahl, Marion Barry, Carl Rowan, Vice-President Quayle, Larry King, Senator John Warner, Michael Milken, and others—but the grace and forbearance of Cooke's literary hero is missing. Aside from brilliant success with basketball's L.A. Lakers (Cooke signed both Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Magic Johnson) and football's ever-powerful Washington Redskins, the Cooke myth seems to be compounded of tightfisted deals, beginning with radio in Canada and expanding relentlessly south in a dizzying spiral of real estate, cable TV, newspapers, and junk bonds. To the Cooke portrayed here, money is purely and simply power. Absolute loyalty is required: members of the Redskins organization were forbidden to attend the funeral of the previous team owner, Edward Bennett Williams, who was out of favor with Cooke when he died. Sons were required to side against their mother in a divorce proceeding—a mother who repeatedly attempted suicide in her apparent need to escape; a son who hedged was disinherited. Another wife, required repeatedly to abort Cooke's children, was banished when she finally refused. Havill sails very close to the wind in this grim, grotesque, well-documented tale of an unmellowed capitalist whose need to control has extended even to a retroactive name-change for his father—to whom Cooke gave his own (invented) middle name. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 31, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-07013-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
