Technology magnate Zandman—founder of an enterprise doing $1 billion in sales each year, employer of more than 16,000 people in 11 countries, and at the core, Holocaust survivor—tells his story graphically. Zandman came of age in Hell. As a youth, he witnessed the extermination of Polish Jewry by the Nazis. Helpless, he watched his beloved grandfather, with three infants in his arms, taken from their home in Grodno to the gas chambers. Virtually his entire family gone, teenage Felix, an uncle, and a newly married couple were all hidden beneath the cottage of a courageous peasant family, in a hole dug under the floorboards. (The penalty for hiding Jews, of course, was immediate execution.) There they lived in fear for 17 months. Time after time Zandman escaped death. That's the first part of the memoir and it is compelling; his portraits of a gentle and wise family, of a ghetto packed with innocents, and of a historic civilization—all now gone forever—are powerful ones. His story then shifts to France after the war and a professional education, thence to America and his business adventures (starting, ironically, with a new method of measuring stress). Leveraging, merging, acquiring, incorporating, Zandman made himself into the quintessential tycoon. With perhaps pardonable pride (especially regarding his operations in Israel) the author (aided by Chanoff, coauthor of Portrait of the Enemy, 1986) presents his history of his firm, Vishay Intertechnology, and the commercial acumen that built it. The business bio is not a bad tale, but not nearly as arresting as the searing remembrance of his earlier days when survival was all. The two books are fused together for a unique addition the literature of the Holocaust. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-8052-4128-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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