A well-fed dog with no bark or bite.
Dull, pollyannaish family history of greed and general financial grubbiness in post–Gold Rush California.
Freelance journalist Dinkelspiel, great-great granddaughter of Isaias Hellman (1842–1920), discovered a trove of his papers at the California Historical Society and spent eight years digging through them and visiting collections elsewhere to reconstruct the life of her financier forefather. After a brief personal introduction and an equally brief account of Hellman’s quick move to abort a run on his Farmers and Merchants bank in Los Angeles during the Panic of 1893, the author commences a chronological journey through his life. Hellman arrived fairly penniless in Los Angeles (population under 5,000) in 1859 but soon began an archetypal soaring ascension into the stratospheres of wealth. He boasted a mansion, a summer home in Lake Tahoe, successful children and a finger in just about every pie in the California sky: trolleys, oil, water, land, newspapers, higher education and, principally, banking. He consorted with Levi Strauss and competed with the Huntingtons; near the end, he testified repeatedly before grand juries in graft and corruption cases. The author, who often begins chapters with a weather report (“the air was crisp and cold”), offers scant analysis or criticism of her ancestor; the book often reads like a report prepared and delivered by an earnest middle-schooler during Family History Week. She does not consider in any serious, systematic way the deleterious effects Hellman’s greed might have had on employees, small businessmen and farmers. (One unappreciative guy took a couple of shots at him but missed.) As she sees it, all was for the greater good of California; it just so happens that her ancestor got exceedingly rich in the process.
A well-fed dog with no bark or bite.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-35526-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
