A revealing autopsy of a business empire that, it appears, may soon conduct its operations far from the White House.
Despite his claims, Donald Trump is not a good businessman—but he is adept at using other people’s money, including yours and ours.
This book, writes Forbes senior editor Alexander, represents “the most complete financial investigation of President Trump’s business ever published.” Certainly, its pages of tables are suggestive of a business empire that has both benefited and suffered from its brand name. Though Trump boasts of financial holdings many times greater than reality, his net worth has fallen in office precisely because his “decision to keep hold of his business empire proved to be a bad bet that poisoned his properties and, more important, his presidency.” His nickel-and-dime habits of charging rent to his Secret Service details in New York and Florida are just one symptom of that poison, but they go back a long way, lessons learned from Trump’s father, who gave properties to his children, paid them rent for them, and then recovered the money. “It’s tough to catch every lie,” Alexander writes, but plenty of truths emerge, from Trump’s debut in the press after being sued for discriminating against Black renters to the extraordinary debt load his organization carries. And then there’s that famous double-dealing. Even a simple hamburger at the Trump Hotel in D.C. costs $26, and the boss requires that the substandard products of his Virginia winery be sold exclusively—at $68 for a bottle of bad Chardonnay. The inflated figures are characteristic: Using a couple of industry-standard methods of calculation, Alexander argues that the D.C. hotel is worth about $300 million less than the $500 million Trump is asking for it. The author does give Trump props for his skill at buying and refurbishing distressed golf courses—though again, after the election, bookings at just one of them instantly fell by 100,000 nights.
A revealing autopsy of a business empire that, it appears, may soon conduct its operations far from the White House.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18852-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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
SEEN & HEARD
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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