Grand successes and epic failures, engrossingly recounted.
Lavish, multifaceted portrait of the early-20th-century American business titan, emphasizing the man rather than the money.
British historian Cannadine (In Churchill’s Shadow, 2003, etc.) shows power, politics, art and money all working together in the life of Andrew Mellon (1855–1937). Born and bred into the world of finance and industry, Mellon was shy and obsessed with self-sufficiency. A lengthy opening section here on Mellon’s father, Thomas, explains his impact on his son’s character. At 19, Mellon began work at the family bank under his father’s watchful eye. Their formula for success—invest to increase value; leave get-rich-quick schemes to fools—was hardly revolutionary, but Cannadine’s exposition of the early years lays the groundwork for a fuller picture of Mellon. Somewhat repetitive stories of mergers and acquisitions (both financial and artistic) frame the story of Mellon’s personal struggles. Less than adept in relationships outside the office, at 43 he fell for and married an English girl of 19. The marriage ended in divorce 14 years later, the first of two major scandals the otherwise private Mellon endured. (The second involved accusations of tax fraud in the mid-1930s by a hostile New Deal government.) Though the financier preferred to exercise his power out of the spotlight, circumstances often moved him to the center of attention. When asked to become Secretary of the Treasury in 1921, Mellon would have liked to turn down the offer in order to concentrate on building closer ties with his estranged daughter, but he felt obligated to help rebuild a country recovering from war. Once in Washington, he saw an opportunity to leave a lasting legacy in the form of the National Gallery of Art. Although he didn’t live to see its completion, his dream was ultimately fulfilled. Cannadine’s insightful account reveals Mellon as a man who took personal risks that seemingly defied his upbringing.
Grand successes and epic failures, engrossingly recounted.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-679-45032-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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