A controversial airing of business issues from a decade ago.
Neal (Business Ethics and Law/Northern Kentucky Univ.) debuts with an investigation into the riches-to-rags career of Dennis Kozlowski, the former CEO of Tyco International who was convicted for grand larceny and other crimes and is still serving an indeterminate sentence in prison.
The narrative features interviews with the principals in the case (which took off following the Enron scandal), including, for the first time, Kozlowski himself, former New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and members of his prosecution team, and executives from Tyco, and the author raises many questions about the prosecution and its results. Cross-checking her findings with trial transcripts and regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Neal explores how Kozlowski could have stolen money he appeared to have been entitled to by actions of the corporation's board. She asks whether the DA's office was not as scrupulous in prosecuting as it might have been—e.g., in observing the defendant's rights. She also notes that Kozlowski's associates at Tyco might have been open to indictment for allowing their chief such privileges as his almost open-ended pay agreement. She contends that this affected their role as witnesses for the prosecution. Additionally, Neal points to the role of the press in shaping the climate in which the prosecution unfolded, with lurid stories about Kozlowski's luxurious lifestyle of excess. The evidence on which these questions are based seems to be substantial. Kozlowski, from jail, is able to say that he never had a chance to put up a proper defense and offers, nearly eight years after his conviction (subsequently upheld by higher courts), his claim to innocence. The author's concluding refusal to “assign blame or attribute bad motives” strengthens the questions raised.
A controversial airing of business issues from a decade ago.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1137278913
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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