Best appreciated by those who know the difference between debentures and dentures.
Gould, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan, those legendary robber barons, weren’t so bad after all, says financial writer Morris (Money, Greed, and Risk, 1999, etc.).
Our able guide to the industry of the Gilded Age, unlike many before him, doesn’t find mountains of muck to rake. The fabled wheeler-dealers—Jay and John D., J. P. and Andrew—are presented as intelligent, resolute and often honest. Well, the honest part never really fit Carnegie, whom Morris brands as hypocritical and mendacious. From the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, this quartet comprised the nation’s commercial avatars. Gould, with comical Jim Fisk, mined the gold. Rockefeller drilled the oil. Morgan sold the government’s guns to the government. (It was later that he saved the country from disaster as “de facto central banker.”) Carnegie, dominating steel, looked the other way during the unpleasantness of the Homestead Strike. It was an era of huge factory farms (“bonanza farms,” they were called) and of offices brimming with paperwork. In a time when steel, not silicone, nourished America’s growth, railroads and department stores flourished. And these four men, with their like-minded associates, managed it all. Perhaps inequality of wealth was great, but, as Morris notes, “it is even higher today.”
Best appreciated by those who know the difference between debentures and dentures.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7599-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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