Decent background on mining and other aspects of American society and industry early in the 20th century, but lacking a...
Sixth historical collaboration from the Ungers (LBJ, 1999, etc.): a scattershot group portrait of the Jewish-American dynasty that included major industrialists and patrons of the arts.
The book’s first and better half chronicles the Guggenheims’ origins in Switzerland and their accumulation of substantial wealth from silver, copper, and other valuable ores after patriarch Meyer Guggenheim emigrated in 1848 to America. Meyer got the family into the mining and smelting business, insisting that all seven of his sons share equally in the responsibilities and rewards. Second son Daniel kept the fortune growing, and, by the standards of the time, the Guggenheims were humane employers, not only in the western US but also in Mexico and Chile. As Daniel’s son Harry moved the family into aviation, publishing and philanthropy, the narrative loses its focus, attempting to cover too many relatives with widely divergent interests over several generations—a family tree is sorely missed. Daniel’s younger brother Solomon and niece Peggy were pioneering advocates of modern art, and the Ungers capably sketch the pair’s achievements without adding anything new to their biographies or to our understanding of their relationship with other Guggenheims. A plethora of further descendants with different last names (offspring of those neglected daughters) also get the thumbnail-sketch treatment, including Harold Loeb (model for the anti-Semitic caricature in The Sun Also Rises) and book publisher Roger Straus Jr. among those about whom we don’t learn much new. The Ungers fail to give a sense of what the family dynamic was, other than being hard on girls, and it’s particularly unsatisfying that they never address the question of why so many of the Guggenheims were married and divorced multiple times.
Decent background on mining and other aspects of American society and industry early in the 20th century, but lacking a coherent thread to make sense of the Guggenheims’ relationship to their nation or to each other.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-018807-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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