Intimate but also sweeping, capturing the myopia of both business and government as America’s addiction to foreign oil set...
How one woman hurdled journalism’s gender barrier to help shape the future of Big Oil.
Off the Record Research reporter Rubino once worked for Wanda Jablonski (1920–1992), the subject of this case study in how knowledgeable journalism can shape events. Born in Slovakia, Jablonski came to America at age five, when her father Eugen was hired by a Standard Oil affiliate. They arrived in Texas in the heyday of U.S. oil exploration; young Wanda was immersed in the excitement, and the technical jargon, of the petroleum boom. The family also lived in England and Egypt while Eugen pursued a peripatetic oil career. Wanda returned to the United States to get a bachelor of arts degree from Cornell and began graduate studies in public law and government at Columbia, but quit in 1943. She tried to get a job at the Council on Foreign Relations, but was turned down because she couldn’t type. Chance took her to the stodgy but respected New York Journal of Commerce as a messenger. Her career took off when the regular petroleum reporter left and Jablonski was given a string of temporary assignments to write articles on the oil business, initially using the byline W.M. Jablonski to disguise her gender. After she moved to Petroleum Week in 1955, however, she won the right to use her full name; her ability to pry inside information from the secretive major oil companies had made her columns an industry must-read. Later, the affinity she developed with national leaders and oil ministers throughout the Middle East made Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, the publication she founded in 1961, “the bible of the international oil world.” She often chided U.S. CEOs on their arrogance and insensitivity in international dealings, and to the extent that she saw it all coming, Jablonski deserved her nickname as “OPEC’s midwife.”
Intimate but also sweeping, capturing the myopia of both business and government as America’s addiction to foreign oil set in over four decades.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7277-6
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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