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
Despite its many virtues, this memoir is simply too idiosyncratically detailed to be of general interest.
A veteran lawyer recounts his decision to return to school to earn a doctorate in law.
At 72, after about 45 years of practicing as a lawyer, Hopkins (Nonprofit Governance: Law, Practices, and Trends, 2009) made a decision that bewildered and frustrated his colleagues: He went back to school. He had already obtained the only two other academic degrees in law available: a JD and an LLM, the equivalent of a master’s. In pursuit of his dream, he enrolled at the University of Kansas Law School, where he was teaching a course as an adjunct (it sometimes happened that a student or two was also a classmate). Hopkins’ charming remembrance splits into two narrative threads: his career as a lawyer before his decision to return to school and his coursework in pursuit of the doctorate. His professional life is a study in the marriage of disciplined hard work and happenstance. He was tasked by his employer with keeping notes on the congressional hearings devoted to the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which not only led to his legal specialization, but also opportunities to teach, lecture, and publish. (Hopkins has written more than 30 books.) He provides an excruciatingly detailed account of the coursework he completed prior to his dissertation work as well as a minute account of the dissertation itself. The author graduated in 2016 and includes written sentiments from friends and colleague as well as poem (of sorts) reflecting on the experience in its completion. Hopkins is an experienced writer, and so it’s no surprise that his prose is consistently clear, though it’s also companionably informal and lighthearted. It’s not clear to whom this recollection is addressed—while his unusual experience is likely to be instructive and inspiring to other lawyers, the microscopic account of his coursework won’t win wide appeal. He quotes his course textbooks frequently and seems driven by a desire to achieve exhaustive comprehensiveness more than readability. Some will find his reasons for his peculiar decision wanting as well—he wanted a challenge—especially given its centrality to the book.
Despite its many virtues, this memoir is simply too idiosyncratically detailed to be of general interest.Pub Date: May 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4809-6044-2
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An estimable biography that portrays Truman, the patron saint of beleaguered pols, as an ordinary American but an extraordinary president. As narrative, this biography cannot begin to compete with David McCullough's Truman (1992). However, historian Ferrell (Indiana Univ., Bloomington; Ill-Advised, 1992, etc.) partly makes up for this with his mastery of Truman sources (he has written or edited eight previous books on the president) and his shrewd analysis of the workings of executive power. He shows how Truman, with his Missouri twang and his background as the product of Kansas City's Pendergast machine, seemed smaller than life, even grubby, compared to the patrician FDR. But he believes that Truman surpassed his predecessor in decisiveness, veracity, and stamina. Unpretentious and optimistic, Truman was temperamentally well equipped to lead the nation as it was being challenged by communism abroad. Yet Truman, now one of our most beloved presidents, saw his approval rating dip to only 23% a year before he left office—one point lower than Richard Nixon's when he resigned. Ferrell attributes this at least partly to depleted energy, but other factors may have come into play, such as his loyalty to corrupt cronies, a GOP congressional bloc that saw the opportunity to gain political capital by Red-baiting, and his method of dealing solely with a few congressional leaders. Ferrell's portrait differs significantly in only two ways from the current wisdom: He portrays a president who thought more deeply, both before and long after the fact, about the ramifications of dropping the atomic bomb than he is generally given credit for; and he makes a bigger issue of Truman's addition of his wife, Bess, to his senatorial payroll (an ethical lapse that he feared would doom his chances for the vice presidency in 1944). An incisive study of a gutsy underdog who rose to the occasion.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8262-0953-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
