Although the narrative is occasionally plodding, Baum’s history is incendiary, providing fuel for many a political fire.

CITIZEN COORS

AN AMERICAN DYNASTY

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

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If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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