Revealing memoir from a significant 20th-century business leader.
The banker who famously helped to save New York City from bankruptcy recalls his career as a leading Wall Street dealmaker.
A self-described “capitalist with a liberal conscience,” 82-year-old Rohatyn (Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now, 2009, etc.) remains an advisor to the investment bank Lazard Frères, where founder Andre Meyer first hired him in 1948. Ultimately rising to managing director, Rohatyn spent more than 40 years with Lazard, participating in major mergers and acquisitions, including headline-makers like the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, the RCA merger with GE and numerous acquisitions for ITT, whose chair, Harold Geneen, was his mentor. A staunch Democrat, he served as President Clinton’s Ambassador to France, the nation his Polish-Jewish family had fled 60 years earlier to escape the Nazis. In this well-written memoir, the author says dumb luck—certainly not his lackluster record as a Middlebury College physics major—led him to investment banking, about which he knew nothing. For many years, he writes, he acted naively, even stupidly on occasion, notably at a grueling 1972 Congressional hearing into ITT affairs, where he appeared without an attorney. He writes at length about his most rewarding success—resolving New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s as chair of the New York Municipal Assistance Corp.—and provides some wonderful scenes: Rohatyn calling Attorney General John Mitchell nightly, to report on the state of Wall Street, only to listen to a drunken Martha Mitchell ranting about left-wing pinkos and Vietnam; Rohatyn roaming deserted Manhattan streets at 2 a.m. strategizing with Geneen; Rohatyn racing from Elaine’s with New York Gov. Carey to make a private phone call at a nearby bar, where a patron said, “ ‘You look like Hugh Carey,’ ” and the governor replied, “ ‘Are you kidding? What would the governor be doing in a dump like this?’ ” The author also offers tips for effective dealing: In a financial crisis, most data are probably wrong, but you must act, and you must rely on people who might very well have caused the problem.
Revealing memoir from a significant 20th-century business leader.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8196-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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