A dazzling account that deftly combines crime, drama, history, and introspective remembrance.
In this nonfiction book, the daughter of a renowned poet attempts to unravel the mystery of her grandfather’s potential involvement in a corporate scandal.
Cherington never met her grandfather Alpha LaRue “A.L.” Eberhart. But she grew up hearing her father, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, tearfully relate the great injustice A.L. once suffered while working for Geo. A. Hormel & Company, then a sizable meat-processing firm and now a multibillion-dollar conglomerate. In 1922, A.L. was asked to resign by the company’s CEO and founder, George Hormel, after it was discovered that the comptroller, Ransome Josiah “Cy” Thomson, had embezzled more than a million dollars. The resignation request was based on a “flimsy pretext”: that A.L. personally borrowed money from the company’s brokers. Meanwhile, there were suspicions “that A.L. had known Cy was stealing.” Eberhart often recounted the tale with furious indignation—in his eyes, the innocent A.L. was “six feet of manhood and not a mark of fear,” while Hormel was a “bastard, all greed for laying father so low.” But the author gradually became suspicious of her father’s penchant for poetic embellishment. She began to question the “family mythology” and to reflect with impressive sensitivity on the allure of such fabricated histories: “We cling to our myths, especially heady and intoxicating ones. We want to believe them as truth. We help in their construction by denying what’s in front of us and filling in holes to reinforce their validity. And in every great myth there are heroes, ones we don’t want to see fail.” She conducted an investigation and uncovered some discomfiting details—her grandfather was likely friends with Thomson, and at one time the comptroller inexplicably paid off one of A.L.’s loans, an incriminating piece of evidence. Moreover, there were rumors in the aftermath of the scandal that A.L. was an accomplice to Thomson’s crimes. Cherington rigorously combs all the available evidence and reconstructs not only the details of the scandal, but also the history of the company and the industry it came to dominate as well as her grandfather’s significant contributions to both. This is a mesmerizing story, one filled with drama and suspense and told with remarkable emotional insights.
A dazzling account that deftly combines crime, drama, history, and introspective remembrance.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781647420833
Page Count: 272
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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