This much ballyhooed book starts out slowly and seems derivative. Much of the information throughout the text is derived from the newspaper and magazine reportage of other journalists; and another author, Richard M. Clurman, beat Bruck to quite a bit of the drama two years ago in To the End of Time (1992). But despite these obstacles, Bruck manages to compose an interesting book, even though her subject is inherently less interesting than Michael Milken, the key player in Bruck's previous book, The Predator's Ball (1988). Milken was involved in high- stakes criminal conduct; Ross (who by the book's publication will have been dead nearly a year and a half) was pretty much just one more in a long line of greedy, unintrospective tycoons. He was a born dealmaker, a one-time traveling salesman who parlayed his in- laws' lucrative funeral-home business into a diversified company, which he took public in 1962. In 1969, Ross made a surprise bid for Warner-Seven Arts and found himself hobnobbing with the likes of Frank Sinatra. Two decades later, in 1990, Ross helped engineer the megadeal of his life—the merger of Warner with Time Inc. to create the largest communications/entertainment company in the world. Bruck's quotation from opera star Beverly Sills, who spoke at Ross's funeral, sums up the life neatly: ``He was like an opera singer. He was larger than life; he knew how to make grand entrances; he knew he didn't have to yell at the top of his lungs to keep an audience's attention; he was always on a diet; and he knew how to share curtain calls.'' In an age of biographers acting as pathographers, Bruck is refreshingly generous in spirit. The book is not a valentine, but Bruck explains Ross's good qualities as well as his bad. By retaining her mental balance about her subject, Bruck allows the reader to enjoy mental balance as well.
Pub Date: April 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-72574-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
