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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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