A thoroughly researched, nuanced appreciation of a complex, talented and troubled man.
A National Book Award–winning historian takes an in-depth look at the 20th-century’s most innovative publishing titan.
The son of a Presbyterian missionary, Henry R. Luce (1898–1967) grew up in China. Eager for distinction as a scholarship student at Hotchkiss and Yale, Luce, along with classmate Brit Hadden, founded Time in 1923. This invention of a weekly news magazine designed to inform people about an increasingly complex world started a publishing empire that eventually included the popular pioneer of photojournalism, Life, along with Fortune and Sports Illustrated. With ventures into book publishing, radio and newsreels, Luce consistently demonstrated an almost unerring instinct for connecting with the public. Amassing great wealth while notoriously imposing a distinct editorial slant on all his publications, he championed American exceptionalism, warned against the dangers of isolationism and ardently promoted the virtues of capitalism. In graceful prose, Brinkley (History/Columbia Univ.; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 2009, etc.) tells especially interesting stories about Luce’s curious relationship with Hadden, his difficult dealings with star writers Whittaker Chambers and Theodore White, his uncharacteristically high-profile involvement in the Willkie campaign and his odd attraction to the Kennedy candidacy. A stout cold warrior, Luce spent the last decades of his life constantly traveling, attempting to exert hands-on control over his vast domain and negotiating a tumultuous second marriage with the difficult and glamorous Clare Boothe Luce. Brinkley portrays Luce as ferociously ambitious, endlessly curious, fundamentally restless, virtually friendless and, by his death, deeply unhappy. Notwithstanding the publisher’s heroic efforts to shape his times, Brinkley correctly identifies Luce’s real achievement: the publications he created, “reflections of the middle class world” of a nation that had reached unprecedented heights of power and influence.
A thoroughly researched, nuanced appreciation of a complex, talented and troubled man.Pub Date: April 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-679-41444-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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