Instructive account of a cash-crazy financier whose wealth could never exceed her dreams of avarice. (8-page photo insert,...
Slack (Nobel Obsession, 2002, etc.) paints an un-disparaging portrait of the woman best known, though little heard of today, as a mean old rich lady.
Before Enron’s and Tyco’s overreaching malefactors, before Martha Stewart or Leona Helmsley, back in the Gilded Age of the fabled robber barons, Hetty Green (1834–1916) drew an outsized amount of public attention. Once a pretty Quaker heiress from New Bedford, she attained notoriety as “the Witch of Wall Street,” in control of hundreds of millions invested in mines and mortgages, government and corporate bonds, railroads, and real estate. Green’s business acumen and sharp practices were legendary, but Slack gives equal attention to her fabulous lack of people skills. From her youth, she was contemptuous, unkempt, and unclean. When a broker’s collapse cost her $500,000, she seemed to declare war on the world, often resorting to extravagant commercial litigation and specious will contests, though she despised lawyers as much as anyone. Green had few friends other than the obliging president of Chemical Bank, where she was the largest depositor. She hung her bonnet and black reticule in Chemical’s back offices, sometimes (to save the cost of lunch) bringing with her a bit of oatmeal to be warmed on a radiator. Parsimonious and tax-averse, she avoided New York’s fabled “millionaire’s row” on Fifth Avenue, moving from rooms in Brooklyn to flats in Hoboken. Slack describes Hetty’s exacting relations with her feckless husband, her affable, outsized Texan son, her meek wisp of a daughter, and her little dog too. With the passing of the old lady’s children, who left no heirs, the fabulous fortune swiftly dissipated. It’s a cautionary tale too soon forgotten—Arthur Lewis’s excellent The Day They Shook the Plum Tree is now four decades old—and Slack offers an exemplary retelling for a new generation.
Instructive account of a cash-crazy financier whose wealth could never exceed her dreams of avarice. (8-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-054256-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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