Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith is the world’s most successful brokerage firm. Perkins (History/Univ. of Calif., Los Angeles) tells of its founder and how, with his eponymous partners, he brought the blessings of investing to the masses. Perkins focuses on Charlie Merrill as businessman, foregoing deep character delineation. In a stab at financial hagiography, comparison is made to larger-than-life folk like J.P. Morgan. Undeniably, Charlie (as he is called to this day) wielded an important influence on Wall Street and how the Street did business, but contrary to the author’s manifest intent, this first published biography somehow makes him seem less a visionary than a comic strip bigwig. The narrative of Charlie, an everyday southern gent who rose to great power and wealth, never ignites. From his college days, through his days as the boss of both the Safeway grocery chain and his own Wall Street business, to his semi-retirement and ultimate demise, Charlie seems, frankly, like a tedious fellow—one with penchants for bridge, obedience to his commands, and, not least, trophy wives. (For a more passionate view, one might consult the works of his son, poet James Merrill). The founder’s personal story is lightly integrated with the ascendance of Merrill Lynch. Promoting first-rate public relations, new marketing techniques as well as intensive brokers’ training, Merrill Lynch did, indeed, democratize investing and became a great enterprise with branches as ubiquitous as Starbucks. But one still awaits the definitive study of MLPF&S as a business phenomenon. Meanwhile, the present text, if not animated, is clear and generally accurate (despite Perkins’s grating habit of calling the back office, where bookkeeping is done, by the more theatrical but mistaken term, “backstage”). A decent, not definitive attempt to depict, at once, the history of a business and its founder, sounding more like a curriculum vitae than a full-blown biography of Merrill and his company.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-521-63029-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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