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
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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