Up from poverty with ``beautiful, glamorous'' ex-Washington ``social hurricane'' Mosbacher, 45, who here releases her secrets for getting what she wants—including marrying a millionaire (in her case, three); buying and selling businesses at a profit (using her divorce settlements as seed money); and conquering the Washington social scene by raising pots of money for political campaigns. The moral: Any woman can serve her own interests if she'll harness the gale-force drive called ``feminine force.'' Like most books promoting the power of positive thinking, this is part inspirational biography, part celebrity gossip, and part instruction manual. Mosbacher's ``feminine force'' was handed down through three generations of poor but independent Indiana women, and outlived two divorces—from kind but boring (and possibly insufficiently rich) L.A. mogul Robert Muir, whom the author married at 23, and from George Barrie, the elderly, drunken, and abusive but very rich and powerful CEO of FabergÇ. (Later, the author pressed into marriage a reluctant ex-secretary of commerce, Robert Mosbacher, richer and more powerful than either of her previous husbands.) Feminine force has carried Mosbacher through the buying and selling of La Prairie cosmetics, the founding of her own company, and the painful episode of discovering that her beloved brother is an alcoholic. Her secret: Early on, she remade herself to ``bring out the inner me.'' She understands that ``attention is power'' and so promotes her image wherever she goes- -including to White House dinners her husband can't attend. Although she never gives up, she does compromise: ``There are differences between men and women,'' she writes, including a man's natural inability to worry about dinners and clean socks—that's a woman's job. A thoroughly American, unflaggingly cheerful view of life that will appeal to many readers. What sourpuss would ask for rigorous honesty besides? (Eight pages b&w, eight pages color photographs- -not seen) (First serial rights to Cosmopolitan and New Woman)
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-79896-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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