A feverish recollection of boom times, paranoia, celebrity and greed, and a cautionary tale of the American lust for easy...
Riveting story of celebrity financial adviser Dana Giacchetto, ’90s tabloid fodder and “Scammer to the Stars.”
Journalist White’s account of the Icarus-like rise and fall of Giacchetto reads as both a fascinating account of a classically narcissistic, self-deluding personality and as an elegy to the booming ’90s, felled by the “irrational exuberance” that so characterized Giacchetto. The boyish money man represented a new kind of mogul, youthful, idealistic, sensitive to art and culture. He parlayed his preternatural charm and studied hipness into friendships with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, cultivating them and other artists, musicians and stars as clients who were refreshed by his style and optimism—he “got it,” he was cool, not a suit, and he was going to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. In fact, he mismanaged funds, made bad investments and defrauded his clients out of millions of dollars, all the while protesting his innocence, claiming conspiracy and scheming to again enter the rarified celebrity orbit that his crimes afforded him in the first place. White was a personal friend of Giacchetto’s (ever the attention-monger, he suggested she write a book about him during one of her visits to him in jail), and lost her life savings in his various frauds and schemes—her ambivalence toward the charismatic, vulnerable young man (he was catnip to ladies of a maternal bent) lends the narrative an unexpected emotional urgency as White struggles with her diffidence and complicity in Giacchetto’s impossible promises of effortless wealth—after all, she was one of those unworldly bohemians who expected to make money while she slept.
A feverish recollection of boom times, paranoia, celebrity and greed, and a cautionary tale of the American lust for easy fame and fortune.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-5996-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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
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