The elusive publishing mogul Si Newhouse is portrayed with much verve and little sympathy by Felsenthal, who has previously profiled Katharine Graham (Power, Privilege and the Post, 1993). The Newhouse media empire started with Si’s father, Sam Newhouse, who kept buying newspapers, most of them mediocre, until he gathered one of the most lucrative chains in the nation. He never dictated policy, never caved to unions, and never sold a paper; he just bought more. To teach them the business, he dispatched sons Si and Donald from city to city on their “paper route.” When the family enterprise dropped into the laps of the boys, younger brother Donald ran the profitable papers. Si seemed to find his mÇtier in the byzantine culture of magazines when, in 1959, he bought venerable CondÇ Nast, publisher of Vogue and other valuable periodicals. Under his erring management, CondÇ Nast endures mercurial masthead changes and, Felsenthal establishes, continuously bleeds money. He bought the renowned New Yorker; since then, there’s been internecine warfare and floods of red ink while, in Felsenthal’s view, the magazine lost its way under the guidance of Tina Brown (who recently and famously jumped ship). Si captured Random House, too; then, recently, he sold it to a foreign media conglomerate. Felsenthal has a jolly, gossipy time in the worlds of Brown, Diana Vreeland, and Si’s old pal, the late Roy Cohn. Much of the text is based on interviews with fugitives from the land of hype and buzz, which lends it a certain ad hominem flair. The Newhouse visage, dÇcor, demeanor, and lack of appropriate philanthropic urge—none quite meet the author’s standards (though according to one source, his wife “knows how to seat people”). A former girlfriend compliments Si as “very sensual in his own wee little way.” Here’s a sly and occasionally catty story of publishing—an occasionally feline business—and an absorbing study of a feckless billionaire. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-888363-87-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
