Although the narrative is occasionally plodding, Baum’s history is incendiary, providing fuel for many a political fire.
An anecdotal history tracing the fortunes of the American brewing family known as much for its right-wing politics as for
its suds, written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Baum (Smoke and Mirrors, 1996). The founder of the Coors dynasty was Adolph Coors, who arrived in Colorado in 1873 and built a brewery in the foothills above Denver—thereby founding a town that now, Baum observes, feels like "a fragment of Hamtramck, Michigan, dropped amid spectacular Rocky Mountain wilderness." Adolph and his sons had strong feelings about the proper places of bosses and workers, and they made a name for themselves as sometimes beneficent but more often harsh owners who busted unions and relentlessly combed the ranks of their workers to weed out "thieves, radicals, and homosexuals." The Coors family was often innovative in business, introducing the aluminum beverage can into the American market, but Baum maintains that its elders made some bad calls, missing opportunities to capture a homegrown market in mineral water and refusing to pasteurize their beer to allow its sale outside the immediate region. Constantly mired in labor disputes and lawsuits, boycotted by unions and civil-rights groups, the Coors company nevertheless built a huge national market in the 1970s, helped along by Gerald Ford’s publicly admitted fondness for the company’s beer. Now publicly held, the Coors company has made efforts to present itself as politically mainstream by hiring more minority workers, but the changes have only gone so far. As Baum concludes, "Although bludgeoned into becoming more progressive within the walls of its brewery, the Coors family has chosen to remain committed on the national level to reversing the racial, sexual, environmental, and social revolutions of the twentieth century"—reason enough for millions of consumers to insist on boycotting (or buying) the Coors’s brew.
Although the narrative is occasionally plodding, Baum’s history is incendiary, providing fuel for many a political fire.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-15448-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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 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
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