The dearth of diaries and personal correspondence available to the author has not prevented her from writing a thoroughly...
The transporting tale of Hetty Green, who, after being rejected by her parents, learned business from her grandfather and amassed a fortune valued at $100 million in 1916.
Wallach (Seraglio, 2003, etc.) frequently points out that Green’s methods and philosophy of wealth were remarkably similar to that of Warren Buffett. She particularly notes the many references to her miserliness and how the same qualities were seen as mere eccentricity in men. Her Quaker background taught her how to be independent and make business decisions, and she never wasted her time and especially not her money on the foolishness of the Gilded Age. Green gave freely to charities of her choice but ruthlessly foreclosed when a note was due and unpaid. When her husband needed a bailout from one of his ill-advised speculations, she demanded his properties in return. She always kept a great deal of cash at the ready in order to quickly take advantage of a good buy, and she never bought anything until she had thoroughly investigated every aspect of it. She enjoyed the game of business, especially beating out her rivals. Green emerged from multiple financial disasters—e.g., in 1873, 1893 and 1908—richer than before, always buying as others panicked and selling when prices finally recovered. Her fiscal policies were firm, and she never waivered from them: Never use another’s money, never take on a partner, and avoid the pitfalls of leveraging, overborrowing and overspending.
The dearth of diaries and personal correspondence available to the author has not prevented her from writing a thoroughly enjoyable biography.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-53197-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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