A revealingly revisionist biography of Armand Hammer who, before his death at 92 in 1990, had made a considerable name for himself as an industrialist, patron of the arts, philanthropist, and unofficial envoy to Communist seats of government. Drawing on a wealth of previously classified material from KGB files and other sources, Epstein (Deception, 1989, etc.) documents the substantive disparities between reality and his subject's carefully cultivated public image. While sojourning in the USSR during the early 1920s, the Bronx-born Hammer met Lenin and became a Comintern agent responsible for laundering the money used to pay undercover operatives in North America. Returning to the US during the Depression, the would-be magnate did not strike it rich until 1956, when he used his third wife's money to latch on to Occidental Petroleum, which, with a little luck and a lot of bribes, he turned into a transnational energy colossus. Taking advantage of auld acquaintance with long-dead Red luminaries, he also became a vocal advocate of unrestricted East/West trade during the height of the Cold War. A gifted and tireless self-promoter, Hammer was a gleeful forger as well; with the connivance of his Kremlin accomplices, he flooded the global art market with fake FabergÇ objets. While shamelessly lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize in his twilight years, moreover, he picked up a conviction for violations of US election law. In addition he faced constant accuations of wrongdoing by the FBI, IRS, SEC, State Department, and other federal agencies. Nor, by Epstein's tellingly detailed account, was the high-profile Hammer a much better bargain for members of his extended family, friends, and business associates (whose tenure seldom outlasted their usefulness) or Occidental's stockholders. A dirt-dishing, painstakingly corroborated life story that sets the record straight on a master con man who fooled most of the people most of the time. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44802-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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