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 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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