More than fluff, Taraborrelli has written the definitive biography of a family whose glory days may have passed but which...
A best-selling celebrity biographer chronicles the epic saga of a family as well known for its business empire as for its role as tabloid fodder.
Today, the Hilton name might be more synonymous with gossip magazine headlines than the now-ubiquitous hotel chain that has outposts in every major city across the world. No longer is there a charismatic figurehead to act as the family’s anchor or face of the company, as founder and family patriarch Conrad Hilton (1887-1979) once had been. We can only speculate how Conrad, a man of deep Catholic conviction and faith who was known to openly resent freeloading relatives, would react to the unseemly behavior of some of his heirs. Nevertheless, Taraborrelli (After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family—1968 to the Present, 2012, etc.) gives each Hilton family member his or her due. From Conrad’s tempestuous marriage to Zsa Zsa Gabor to son Nicky’s ill-fated and abusive marriage to a nubile Elizabeth Taylor, the Hilton name has often found itself mired in social controversy. All the while, the Hilton brand of hotels continued to grow exponentially, developing into an international juggernaut. When Conrad’s son Barron retired as CEO of the Hilton Hotel Corporation in 1996, the family’s control of the company remained mostly symbolic until Blackstone Group, a private equity group, purchased the entire corporation in 2007 for $20.1 billion. No longer is a Hilton family member steering the empire built by Conrad. Instead, the family controls the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to support various charitable causes and missions to fulfill Conrad’s vision of building a better world.
More than fluff, Taraborrelli has written the definitive biography of a family whose glory days may have passed but which simply refuses to recede into the background.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-1669-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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