During this time of bloated biographies, here is a refreshingly brief portrait of one of the most important figures of 19th-century European economic and modern Jewish history: Meyer Amschel Rothschild (17441812). Elon, the veteran Israeli journalist (Jerusalem: City of Mirrors, 1989; Herzl: A Biography, 1975; etc.) presents a man who spent almost his entire life in the crowded, sunless Judengasse, the ``Jew street,'' that comprised almost all of the Frankfurt ghetto. By skillfully cultivating the nobility and political elite of the surrounding state of Hesse, by demonstrating a single-minded devotion to business, innovative banking, and other mercantile practices, by embracing ``internationalization,'' sending two of his five sons to England and France (the others ultimately settled in Austria and Italy), and perhaps above all, by being fortunate enough to be active in a turbulent time (the Napoleonic wars) that opened up new possibilities, Rothschild gradually developed the powerhouse banking concern. During the decade from 1797 to 1807 alone, his assets quadrupled. However, the achievements of his five sons, led by Nathan in London, were even more impressive; their capital grew 40-fold between 1815 and 1828. By 1850, the ``House of Rothschild'' already had achieved mythical status for everyone from anti-Semitic political leaders to Jewish satirists. While periodically overwhelming the reader with technical details of high finance, Elon skillfully evokes the man (and his devoted, hyper- frugal wife, Guttle) and his expansive, if highly anti-Semitic, era. (In Frankfurt, Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto at night, and on Sundays they were not permitted to leave until church services ended; Christians addressed them with the same familiarity they used for servants.) While many books have dealt with the Rothschilds, Elon's focus on the family's founding patriarch yields a thoroughly researched, fascinating, and altogether exemplary biography. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86857-4
Page Count: 201
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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
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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