In her latest of a series of studies of formidable women, Felsenthal (Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 1988, etc.) profiles the longtime Washington Post and Newsweek publisher, often called ``the most powerful woman in the world.'' As the now-retired Graham writes her memoirs, she will surely feel aggrieved by this massive, often unsparing biography. A journalistic diamond in the rough, the book is far too long, sometimes bland, and without analysis of the Post's strengths or shortcomings. But Felsenthal has found the devil in the details. She has gotten scores of people to spill the beans on her subject, including many male editors who, sometimes because of their own sexism, were unceremoniously sacked by this unmerry widow. (``God must have loved Newsweek editors,'' cracked one victim. ``He made so many of them.'') Dozens of incidents reveal Graham in the worst moments of her infinite variety: capricious, snobbish, and, when necessary, ruthless (her crushing of the rival Washington Star and of her own paper's union helped her roll up huge profits in the 1980's). Yet, astonishingly enough for a woman born into privilege as the daughter of financier-publisher Eugene Meyer, Graham also wins admiration here for her attempt to overcome the effects of her turbulent family life. Humiliated by both her pretentious mother and her charismatic but manic-depressive husband Phil Graham, she wasn't prepared to assume control of the Post and Newsweek after the latter's suicide in 1963. But despite her lingering insecurity, Graham invariably made the right decision when the chips were down- -in entrusting the Post to editor Ben Bradlee, in publishing The Pentagon Papers, and in risking the Nixon Administration's wrath with her paper's Watergate coverage. She ended her career as the only female head of a Fortune 500 company. Skin-deep on the Post's influence—yet compulsively fascinating on the woman who constantly surprised the men who underestimated her. (Photos—16 pp. b&w—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 1993
ISBN: 0-399-13732-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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
SEEN & HEARD
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