A sequel of sorts to The Making of a Jew (1996). Between the making of deals, flying around on jets, and the eating of good brisket sandwichesall chronicled hereit's hard to tell when Bronfman had the time to write this odd but rather appealing book, part memoir and part savvy digest of big-business deal-making. The narrative offers a series of glimpses of Bronfman's business dealings at Seagram's, of which he is now the chairman, interspersed with glimpses of childhood events that Bronfman believes have helped shape his outlook and appetites. His family settled in Montreal and lived lavishly in an enormous home. But Bronfman remembers chiefly a lot of heavy furniture and dark rooms, and notes in passing that he rarely returns there. His job training, to his mind, began on the day of his birth. As the first son, he was automatically in line to take over the company and was expected to begin, at an early age, to master the business from the gorund up. His two older sisters were expected to stay out of his way. His oldest sister died still angry about being cut out of the business, but Bronfman notes that he has made peace with the rest of his family, including his mother, from whom he had been slightly estranged since childhood. Bronfman discusses his family and business life with great honesty and gives a short and harrowing account of the kidnapping of his son Sam in 1975. Bronfman's interests, like his company, are far-reaching, and he manages to pack in detailed discussions of such things as Du Pont stock options, Swiss gold, and the comforts of home in the short span of this book. President of the World Jewish Congress, he closes with an impassioned plea against anti-Semitism. While this is utterly harmless stuff, the book is likely to be of interest to only a small circle of readers.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14374-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
