A straightforward, engaging look at this “German Rockefeller.”
An intriguing exploration of the life of an Augsburg moneylender as a prototypical capitalist in the modern mold.
A former journalist (Wall Street Journal Berlin and London bureau chief), now a New York securities analyst, Steinmetz makes a convincing case for the value of studying enigmatic banker Jacob Fugger (1459-1525), who persuaded the pope to lift the ongoing ban on usury, among other acts that proved galvanizing in the Renaissance era. As the shrewd moneylender to the up-and-coming Habsburg emperor, Maximilian (“the man who, with Fugger’s help, would take the Habsburgs to greatness”), Fugger learned early on the value of making connections with those in power, thanks to indoctrination in his family’s textile business in Augsburg, followed by apprenticeship in the trading houses of Venice. Muscling his way to a monopoly in the silver mining business in the alpine town of Schwaz, then in the Hungarian copper belt, Fugger became the go-to lender for the massive sums required to raise armies and wage war—not just for Maximilian, but for the Portuguese, who traded pepper for Fugger’s metal. Though contemporaries excoriated Fugger as a “profiteer, a monopolist and a Jew,” Steinmetz believes he acted out of the “radical” belief that one did not have to be born noble to be superior. On the contrary, intelligence, hard work, and constant effort made one successful in life, as he amply demonstrated. Eventually, these qualities were the ones he valued the most in the nephews he selected to succeed him. A devout Catholic and severe critic of the restive Lutherans, Fugger served seven popes, lobbied Pope Leo X successfully to lift the ban on what was considered usury, “midwifed” the famous St. Peter’s indulgence that spurred Martin Luther to pen his 95 Theses, and helped bankroll the crushing of the German Peasants’ War—and still managed to die solvent.
A straightforward, engaging look at this “German Rockefeller.”Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8855-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
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
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