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 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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