A flawed biography that reveals more about capitalist societies’ willful ignorance and ethical conundrums than the secret...
A walking-on-eggshells attempt to shed light on arguably the most influential oil trader of our time.
Marc Rich rose to prominence, and billionaire status, in the 1970s by inventing the spot market for oil and by working harder and more aggressively than other commodities traders. His corporation famously traded with apartheid South Africa, Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini, Cuba, Nigeria under the dictator Sani Abacha, China and Russia. In 1983, then–New York attorney Rudy Giuliani brought more than 50 charges against Rich in a highly publicized indictment that ended with Rich in self-exile, the ruination (or exposure, depending on your perspective) of Rich’s name, his tenure on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, his eventual pardon by President Clinton and Rich’s near-complete retreat from the public eye. Rich is a polarizing figure, and while Die Weltwoche business editor Ammann admirably attempts to capture his nuances, the author’s analyses and observations are conducted with undue caution. Circumspect reportage—the author frequently writes of Rich responding “uneasily” or “warily”—gives the impression that Ammann doesn’t wish to jeopardize his position by asking tough questions. This restraint brings unnecessary diffidence to the book, with one surprising exception: a brief, frank interview with one of Rich’s commodities traders. Questioned by Ammann about the ethics of trading with oppressive regimes, the anonymous subject points out that the bauxite used to produce the aluminum in Ammann’s soda can probably came from an oppressive dictatorship, and the oil heating the interview room probably came from Saudi Arabia. “Do the people who criticize our work want to know any of this?” the trader asks. The author assumes that the answer, for most American consumers, is no. To him, Rich and his fellow commodities traders operated, and still operate, “between a sense of reality and self-deception…the name for this gray area is capitalism.”
A flawed biography that reveals more about capitalist societies’ willful ignorance and ethical conundrums than the secret lives of its inscrutable subject.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-57074-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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