The editor of Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy (2001) returns with a thick, assiduously researched biography of Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson (1881–1948), the powerful, tendentious editor of the Washington Times-Herald.
In this numbingly detailed biography, Smith gives us not just the story of her principal but her every element of her back story, and few minor characters walk her stage without major-character treatment. Patterson’s story is indeed complicated, engaging and even bizarre, though it takes her more than 40 pages to arrive in the narrative. A daughter of privilege and publishing, Patterson grew up without much of an education (finishing school sufficed); married an impecunious Polish count, Josef Gizycki, who had drinking, gambling, fidelity and domestic-abuse issues; bore a daughter, Felicia, with whom she would have a long, contentious relationship; fled from the count (who hid the daughter for 18 months) and retreated back into the world of her American family, whose wealth and influence defeated the count’s efforts to extract a portion of fortune for himself. Patterson would marry again, but she would also take over a struggling newspaper in Washington and convert it into an enormously profitable enterprise. She blasted away at FDR and became increasingly vindictive, mercurial and eccentric, before dying suddenly. A long, bitter battle over her complicated assets ensued. Smith seems fascinated by all the money (she frequently footnotes the estimated current value of sums made or spent by Patterson), and she seems unable to determine which biographical or contextual details are primary, secondary, tertiary or superfluous. So she includes them all, just in case. An enormously important subject obscured in a blinding blizzard of undifferentiated fact.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-375-41100-7
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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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