A workmanlike account of the selling and salvaging of R.H. Macy's, an American retailing institution. Wall Street Journal correspondent Trachtenberg (Ralph Lauren, 1988) starts with a brief history of the business founded by Rowland Hussey Macy in New York in 1858. The real story begins, though, with the arrival in 1948 of a trainee named Edward S. Finkelstein. A gifted merchant, the hard-driving Harvard Business School grad worked his way up the corporate ladder and in 1980 was named the Manhattan-based company's CEO, with baronial offices atop its storied Herald Square flagship (still the world's largest department store). Five years on, the vaultingly ambitious Finkelstein (then 60) resolved to take Macy's private, to give himself a freer hand. Fee-hungry investment bankers and lawyers soon arranged a leveraged buyout that yielded stockholders a handsome premium and left Finkelstein & Co. in charge of a debt- burdened national chain. Owing to overly optimistic profit projections and a series of merchandising miscalculations, the deal was in almost instant trouble. Nor did it help that Finkelstein had contracted a severe case of hubris, placing a risky bet on private labels and installing his unqualified sons in key positions. While a cash-strapped Macy's was struggling to convince edgy lenders and vendors it was creditworthy, two top rivals (Allied and Federated) were taken over by an oddball Canadian named Robert Campeau; he promptly managed his new holdings into bankruptcy, forcing Finkelstein (who had rashly entered Macy's in the bidding contest for Federated) to engage in ruinous markdown battles. The company's mistakes and misfortunes eventually put it in receivership, and Federated (which had successfully reorganized in the meantime) was able to acquire Macy's on decidedly favorable terms, with an embittered Finkelstein obliged to watch from the sidelines. An enlightening postmortem on a consequential LBO, which vividly depicts its human and socioeconomic costs. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8129-2155-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
The questionable premise of this data-packed book is that the avant-garde is dead, that the isolated artist spurned by a ridiculing public no longer exists, and that today challenging art is readily brought into mainstream venues. Altshuler, director of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in New York City, focuses on 19 exhibitions held between 1905 and 1969, when the avant-garde was still alive. He covers, among other movements, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, the Blaue Reiter, Dada, Action Painting, and Pop, ending with the ``When Attitudes Become Form'' show at the Bern, Switzerland, Kunsthalle, devoted to the work of conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth, Joseph Beuys, and Richard Artschwager. Altshuler notes that by the late '60s the art- loving public had come not just to tolerate difficult art, but to ``crave'' it. The story of the 20th-century artistic avant-garde is hardly unfamiliar. For years, the permanent collection of New York City's Museum of Modern Art followed the same time line as Attshuler's; also Robert Hughes covered similar ground in The Shock of the New (1981). But Altshuler emphasizes the intense battles artists fought to bring their work into the public eye; many of the century's ground-breaking shows, like the ``First Exhibition of the Editors of the Blaue Reiter'' (Munich, 1911), were organized by the artists themselves and financed by the group's wealthier members. The author describes a group in Japan, the little-known Gutai Art Association, whose activities were funded by Jiro Yoshihara, head of a cooking-oil empire. But unlike today's corporate sponsors, Yoshihara kept company with his artists and felt deeply about their work. Altshuler provides a fascinating account of ``Gutai's Experimental Outdoor Modern Art Exhibition to Challenge the Burning Midsummer Sun'' (outside of Osaka, 1955), showing how that work anticipated process, performance, and conceptual art. While Altshuler does raise valid points, his argument neglects today's increasingly conservative climate for art funding; many avant-garde artists whose grants have recently been withdrawn or their applications denied might feel less than coddled and coopted.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8109-3637-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
Get two filmmakers together to talk about work and the result should be interesting, especially if one of them—Woody Allen- -seldom sits for long interviews. But the operative word here is should. Bjîrkman is a Swedish filmmaker and critic who has done a similar book with Ingmar Bergman (Bergman on Bergman, 1974). He sits a filmmaker down and gets him to talk his way through his career, discussing working methods, influences, collaboration, ideas, and themes. Since Allen rarely gives interviews, this volume is by its very nature an important one for fans of his films, and he is candid about his thematic obsessions—death, the confusion between fantasy and reality, the tensions that threaten the nuclear family. His blowup with Mia Farrow occurred during the course of the interview process, and although he never discusses it directly (which is fine, given the overexposure it received in the press), Allen does talk about the importance of focusing on filmmaking during ``this time of stress''; still, he says its effect on his work was minimal. But this is not a confessional, Barbara Waltersstyle interview. It's two guys talking shop, and Allen speaks at great length about casting decisions, the mechanics of shooting, and the writing process. He can be startlingly on-target when talking about his limitations, as in his observation that too much of his dramatic dialogue sounds like it was written for subtitles, but for much of the book, he seems defensive, particularly about negative critical reactions to his films. Unfortunately, given the opportunity he is presented, Bjîrkman doesn't ask many interesting questions. He shows little knowledge of the New York milieu so essential to Allen's films, or of American culture (popular or high), and no sense of humor at all. As a result, much of the book is just dull. Strictly for those who devour the Woodman's every word.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8021-1556-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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