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
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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