Not nearly so charming as the lobbies Lapidus designs.
An architect who created a casino for The Donald in Atlantic City and a hotel for Donald Duck fans at Disney World reviews his life and decides it’s been awesome.
The 70-year-old Lapidus’s first book proves that gifts in one art are not necessarily transferable. He begins with a funny, Larry McMurtry-esque sentence—“Mrs. Axelrod wanted an ocean view from her bidet”—but the elevator of eloquence drops precipitously thereafter. Nor is the text particularly well organized. Mrs. Axelrod’s bidet is followed by a scattershot resume of his career and some equally scattershot comments about the portrayal of architects in movies before the author gets down to business with a phone call from Donald Trump (whose posterior this lipsticky text decorates throughout) and the subsequent building of Trump Plaza. Then he moves back to confess some boyhood anxieties. Dad, aka Morris Lapidus, the far-more-famous-than-Alan architect who designed Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel, wasn’t very warm. The author skims lightly over military service and the Columbia University School of Architecture to spend more time on the apprentice years with Morris, who didn’t like to praise his son. Alan’s first major project in the late 1960s was a huge swimming pool in Bedford-Stuyvesant; he was pleased that his work, not Dad’s, got kudos from Ada Louise Huxtable, the formidable architecture critic for the New York Times. But apparently public projects weren’t profitable enough, so off he went to the Caribbean, where he made his bones with beautiful buildings that actually functioned well. Then to Atlantic City for casinos, to Disney and New York for hotels. Later came some financial setbacks (bankruptcy), the devastating 9/11 attack and some interesting projects in Cuba and Moscow and Brazil that didn’t always work out. The author is certainly comfortable in the world of fat bank accounts and soaring egos; readers may wonder about his values as he gleefully describes the way casinos seduce customers.
Not nearly so charming as the lobbies Lapidus designs.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36166-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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
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