An unrevealing, workmanlike biography of Walt Disney’s older brother, Roy, the financial brains behind Disney’s success. With only a high school diploma and a handful of years as a bank teller, Roy Disney helped transform Disney from a storefront operation into one of America’s preeminent corporations. While Walt was the visionary and the driving creative force (he conceived of everything from feature-length animated films to Disneyland), Roy was responsible for finding the money to pay for it all. It was Roy who had to attend to the bottom line that his brother so scorned, who had to negotiate all the complex deals and loans, who had to pursue the legions of copyright violators and manage the far-flung sales force. His genial, plainspoken midwestern demeanor camouflaged a tough, canny deal-maker and a keen mind for detail. It was Roy, for example, who as far back as the 1930s insisted on holding onto television rights. Considering their differing temperaments and responsibilities, it isn—t surprising that the brothers did not always see eye to eye. The studio tended to divide into Walt’s “boys” and Roy’s “boys”; there were periods when the brothers quarreled bitterly and communicated only in memos. But they always patched up their differences, and after Walt’s death, Roy postponed his retirement to fulfill his brother’s vision for CalArts and Walt Disney World. Published by Hyperion, a division of Disney, this authorized account has the (inevitably?) sanitized air of a self-serving corporate history about it. Thomas (Clown Prince of Hollywood, 1990, etc.) never manages to get a real feel for his subject and, perhaps because he wrote a biography of Walt, tends to let him dominate throughout. The story’s moral: Genius is seldom solitary and is usually in need of money. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-7868-6200-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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