The founder and CEO of the renegade International Discount Telecommunications firm (IDT) has passed his 40th birthday. He reckons it’s time to tell his life story. A proud graduate of the redoubtable Bronx High School of Science and a really proud drop- out from Harvard (which he found “intellectually sterile, arrogant, closeminded and unfriendly”), Jonas is the exuberant embodiment of freewheeling entrepreneurial chutzpah. He started making money at 14 with a homemade hot dog stand. The junior achiever graduated to further profits via mail order, hawking such gimcrackery as horoscopes, pet plants, and ordinary seedlings marketed as nascent bonsai trees. Sure, some promotions may sound somewhat marginal to readers who don’t share the Jonas spirit. But accept his assurances that he’s no scam artist. He’s just a straightforward self-made businessman, honest to a fault “pathologically honest,” as he puts it. The scrapes that often threaten to thwart his honest efforts, especially his pains in completing IDT’s initial public offering, have been the work of Wall Street insiders, government bureaucrats, AT&T, or the fickle media (which occasionally could be helpful; after a while, the press “adulated” the firm). Between espousals of libertarian doctrine, Jonas does turns as an avuncular metaphysician, waxing profound about society, business, and life in general. Within the genial multimillionaire hustler is a closet rabbi, humbly reflecting on the human condition. Indeed, Jonas personifies real humanity, crediting his success to loyal colleagues and providence, as well as to his own creativity. His devotion to his wife and eight kids is patent. Most folks will find it hard to keep up with the Jonases. Not likely to become required reading at Harvard Business School, but nevertheless more engaging than it has any right to be.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-87902-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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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