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
Expanded from a New Yorker article, this long-winded if well-informed tale has less to do with John Laroche, the “thief,” than it does with our author’s desire to craft a comprehensive natural and social history of what the Victorians called “orchidelirium.” Orlean (Saturday Night, 1990) piles anecdote upon detail upon anecdote—and keeps on piling them. Laroche, who managed a plant nursery and orchid propagation laboratory for the Seminole tribe of Hollywood, Fla., was arrested, along with three tribesmen, in 1994 for stealing rare orchids——endangered species——from the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. He had intended to clone the rarer ones (in particular, the so-called “ghost orchid”) and sell them on the black market. Always a schemer and an eccentric hobbyist (old mirrors, turtles, and Ice Age fossils all fascinated him), Laroche figured he’d make millions. Found guilty, he was fined and banned from the Fakahatchee; the Seminoles, ostensibly exempt under the “Florida Indian” statute concerning the use of wildlife habitats, pled no contest. But Laroche’s travails form only the framework for Orlean’s accounts of famous and infamous orchid smugglers, hunters, and growers, and for her analyses of the mania for “the most compelling and maddening of all collectible living things.” She traces the orchid’s arrival in the US to 1838, when James Boott of London sent a tropical orchid to his brother in Boston. That collection would eventually be housed at Harvard College. Orlean includes passages on legendary hunter Joseph Hooker, eventually director of the Royal Botanical Gardens; on collectors, such as the man who kept 3,000 rare orchids atop his Manhattan townhouse; and of other floral fanatics. Enticing for those smitten with the botanical history of this “sexually suggestive” flower. As for everyone else, there’s little or no narrative drive to keep all the facts and mini-narratives flowing. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44739-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
Not as focused as Just Kids, but an atmospheric, moody, and bittersweet memoir to be savored and pondered.
Iconic poet, writer, and artist Smith (Just Kids, 2010, etc.) articulates the pensive rhythm of her life through the stations of her travels.
Spending much of her time crouched in a corner table of a Greenwich Village cafe sipping coffee, jotting quixotic notes in journals, and “plotting my next move,” the author reflects on the places she’s visited, the personal intercourse, and the impact each played on her past and present selves. She describes a time in 1978 when she planned to open her own cafe, but her plans changed following a chance meeting with MC5 guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, who swiftly stole and sealed her heart with marriage and children. A graceful, ruminative tour guide, Smith writes of traveling together with Fred armed with a vintage 1967 Polaroid to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in northwest French Guiana, then of solitary journeys to Frida Kahlo’s Mexican Casa Azul and to the graves of Sylvia Plath, Jean Genet, and a swath of legendary Japanese filmmakers. After being seduced by Rockaway Beach in Queens and indulgently purchasing a ramshackle bungalow there, the property was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy—though she vowed to rebuild. In a hazy, often melancholy narrative, the author synchronizes past memories and contemporary musings on books, art, and Michigan life with Fred. Preferring to write productively from the comfort of her bed, Smith vividly describes herself as “an optimistic zombie propped up by pillows, producing pages of somnambulistic fruit.” She spent seasons of lethargy binge-watching crime TV, arguing with her remote control, venturing out to a spontaneous and awkward meeting with chess great Bobby Fischer, and trekking off to interview Paul Bowles in Tangiers. No matter the distance life may take her, Smith always recovers some semblance of normalcy with the simplistic pleasures of a deli coffee on her Gotham stoop, her mind constantly buoyed by humanity, art, and memory.
Not as focused as Just Kids, but an atmospheric, moody, and bittersweet memoir to be savored and pondered.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87510-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
SEEN & HEARD
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