A brief and chatty profile that tells much more about Dreyfus's prowess at his hobbies than his career on Wall Street, grafted onto a reprint of his A Remarkable Medicine Has Been Overlooked (1981). Although Dreyfus asserts that he has a small ego, he opens with a cloying letter from The Reporting Angel to Dreyfus's mother (in heaven) listing her son's accomplishments on earth. It is a monumental boast whose claims are repeated ad nauseam in the pages that follow. He was, it seems, awfully good at golf, tennis, card playing, and horse racing. About his success on Wall Street, he is actually quite modest, noting the role of luck in that area: ``The Dreyfus Fund walked into the office, and I bought the right stock for the wrong reason.'' Dreyfus's forte appears to have been not investing, but advertising and promoting the Dreyfus Fund. Readers expecting investment wisdom will find little here, but there is advice on playing gin rummy. The major portion of this work, however, consists of the reprint of Dreyfus's previous book, which details his obsession with the drug phenytoin (Dilantin), a medication that was then known primarily as an anticonvulsant but that he found relieved his depression. Still in his 40s, he left Wall Street to form the Dreyfus Medical Foundation, pouring millions into researching the therapeutic uses of phenytoin and into efforts to disseminate research findings to the medical community. His attempts to interest the federal government as well as Parke-Davis, its manufacturer, in recognizing and promoting phenytoin as a drug of multiple uses were remarkable and seemingly tireless. Indeed, at 82 he is still at it, using potential public interest in his life story to arouse interest in phenytoin. A plug for phenytoin masquerading as autobiography. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-89526-461-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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