An epic, revealing biography that becomes, in its author's words, ``a study in the unapologetic use of a great fortune to secure influence.'' In this first of two projected volumes on the four-term New York governor, Reich (Financier: The Biography of Andre Meyer, 1983), former executive editor of Institutional Investor, depicts a prototypical restless prince. The traits Nelson Rockefeller displayed in bending the rules of his forbidding millionaire father became those he exhibited with powerful superiors in politics: boundless energy, guile, brazenness, and sycophancy. At 23, Nelson formed his own corporation to lure tenants to the new jewel in the family crown, Rockefeller Center. Before long, he became the prime mover among the five Rockefeller sons by outmaneuvering the management team that had built Rockefeller Center, becoming the president of the Museum of Modern Art, and forming business ventures in South America. Turning to Washington in the 1940s and '50s, in midlevel posts, he helped secure Pan-American unity by wrangling admission for Argentina into the UN, proposed Harry Truman's ``Four Point'' program for aid to developing countries, and suggested Dwight Eisenhower's ``Open Skies'' initiative at the 1955 summit. One Cabinet member after another came to splutter at Rocky's nonstop memos, end-runs to the president, and willingness to use his wealth to supplement aides' government salaries and form ad hoc committees that spawned independent initiatives. Rockefeller found an arena more suited for his outsize ambitions by beating Averell Harriman in a 1958 New York gubernatorial race that set a state record for spending. Reich does not neglect the darker aspects of Rockefeller's early career: arrogance, heedless pursuit of big, often profligate projects, and a Bob Packwoodstyle wandering eye for comely assistants. ``Rocky'' here seems less like political tyro growing into his role than one already formed and waiting to burst from his shell. But, using his impressive research (interviews with 350 people and access to the family archives), Reich captures all his magnetism, imperial style, and ruthlessness.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-24696-X
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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