Despite backroom machinations, swashbuckling deals, and towering personalities, this tepid biography is far from being a thriller-diller. While it requires a substantial stretch of imagination to call Barry Diller America's ``greatest entertainment mogul,'' he is certainly one of the more visionary and driven players in the media marketplace today. He was largely responsible for creating the Fox network, his feel for ``product'' is superb, and his attention to detail is legendary. No surprise then that his various wheelings and dealings are closely watched as harbingers of the industry's future direction. Like many wildly successful people, Diller skipped college in favor of an early start on his career, rocketing from that great clichÇd launching pad, the mailroom of William Morris, to ABC, where he quickly rose through the ranks. From there it was off to Hollywood, where, still in his early 30s, he helped save Paramount. This won him the job of CEO at Fox, where he deftly turned the ailing company into the fourth network. But then came the inevitable falling out with owner Rupert Murdoch, and Diller was swiftly jettisoned. Since his ouster, using the home-shopping channel QVC as his lever, he has tried to work his way back to power. After the failed pursuit of Paramount and CBS, he is now buying up independent television stations with the presumed goal of building another network. All fascinating stuff—but fumbled in Mair's (Bette, 1995, etc.) gawky hands. He has a slim grasp of the telling detail or anecdote, the dead-on quote, the revealing aside. He is also woefully reticent about the notoriously private Diller's personal life. Mair does have a good, gut feel for the raw and often brutal workings of big business, but his overarching narrative clunkiness undoes him.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-471-13082-6
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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
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
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