A barely serviceable biography of the billionaire businessman who controls CBS Inc. from a journalist who doesn't quite know what to make of him. Drawing almost entirely on secondary sources, former Wall Street Journal reporter Winans (Malcolm Forbes, 1990) offers a narrative account of how the froglike Laurence (Larry) Tisch transformed himself into a merchant prince. After WW II service with the OSS, the precocious Brooklyn-born Tisch—who earned a Wharton MBA before turning 21—joined the family firm that operated a handful of resort hotels. As young Larry became adept at identifying, acquiring, and rehabilitating undervalued properties, the prospering enterprise moved into major metropolitan markets and gained a controlling interest in the Loews movie-theater chain in 1959. Tisch soon put this publicly held venture on a profitable basis and made it the vehicle for a series of lucrative investments, in Bulova, CNA Insurance, Lorillard, and other companies. Along his upward way, the businessman has had several brushes with disaster, as when he sold swindler Michele Sindona his stake in Franklin National Bank and was completely hoodwinked by the grifters responsible for the Equity Funding fraud. But the bargain-hunting, cash-flow-minded Tisch will be remembered most for his controversial stewardship of CBS. While the media reported his makeover campaign as an indefensible assault on one of their own, the broadcasting empire built by William Paley probably could not have survived as an independent entity without Tisch's cost-cutting measures. Beyond periodic reminders that his subject enjoys the quotidian challenges of major-league commerce, favors liquid reserves, and has no use for corporate executives who do not focus on the stockholders' best interests, Winans offers few clues as to what makes Larry run. The bottom line: An outsider's one-dimensional take on a consequential magnate whose achievements require a more accomplished Boswell.
Pub Date: May 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-471-54923-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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