If diligence alone could yield good biography, Business Week correspondent DeGeorge would have produced a blockbuster on high- profile tycoon H. Wayne Huizenga. Unfortunately, the result of her considerable labors is a bloated, often gushy jumble of raw data. The grandson of a Dutch immigrant who set up shop as a trash hauler in the Chicago area, Huizenga (who turns 58 later this year) entered the same trade in South Florida's Broward County. In league with midwestern family members, the Sunbelt transplant parlayed his one-truck outfit into a sizable equity stake in the multinational disposal firm now known as WMX Technologies. Tired of the constant travel demanded by his executive post, Huizenga left the garbage game in 1982. He dabbled in any number of offbeat pursuits (bottled water, lawn care, portable toilets), but proved a decidedly restless retiree. Huizenga soon went active with Blockbuster Entertainment, a small chain of videocassette-rental shops that he turned into a show-biz power in less than seven years. Since he sold out last year, the major-league baseball, football, and hockey franchises he has bought or launched in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area have kept him occupied to a limited extent. But it's unlikely that the relentlessly enterprising Huizenga will be long absent from the commercial mainstream. At last report, he and his brother- in-law were organizing a new environmental-services/waste-disposal outfit whose revenues they intend to expand rapidly via strategic acquisitions. DeGeorge all but buries Huizenga in a welter of tedious particulars, although she glides quickly by his frequent brushes with regulatory authorities, invariably giving him the benefit of any ethical doubt. For all the detail she has amassed in her kitchen-sink narrative, moreover, DeGeorge never comes to grips with what makes Wayne run. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-471-12269-6
Page Count: 533
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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