Ultimately boring, but good reference material. (8-page photo insert, not seen)
An excruciatingly factual account of the “profit taking” schemes that made Thomas Mellon Evans and his corporate-raiding contemporaries fabulously wealthy in the postwar era.
Although he presents it as the personal story of Thomas Evans, New York Times reporter Henriques (Fidelity's World, 1995) has actually produced something more on the order of a textbook covering the men and ideas behind some of the nation’s first and most notorious proxy fights. The players include Lou Wolfson (a shareholders’-rights crusader who defended his tactics before Congress), Robert Young (the sometime poet who was the first to use public relations and advertising to take his message to shareholders), and Charlie Green (an investor in 20th Century Fox who, snubbed on a visit to the studio lot, waged and lost a major proxy battle with that firm). Evans, however, appears to have used proxy fights simply to accomplish his aim of obsessively building his portfolio and personal wealth. His methods included low-balling old women who were trying to protect their families’ fortunes, and he was particularly keen to target firms that were “family run by a third-generation Yale man who spends his afternoons drinking martinis at the club.” Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell what exactly Henriques thinks of all this, and her reverently dispassionate tone hardly fits into the winner-take-all world she is describing. Nor is it clear why she found Evans interesting. Of one Evans proxy fight, she declares: “It is intriguing that no one wondered aloud or in print why Tom Evans, who was immensely rich, bothered to wage such a bitter expensive battle simply to take control of a paper company.” A reader might well ask Henriques the same question.
Ultimately boring, but good reference material. (8-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: May 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83399-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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