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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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