How one very rich son-of-a-bitch built an empire and destroyed his own family, from Pearson, who chronicled the neuroses of the Churchills in The Private Lives of Winston Churchill (1991, etc.). Second-generation millionaire oilman Jean Paul Getty (18921976) was disinherited by his puritan father because of the younger Getty's profligate lifestyle: As the result of what he called ``matrimonial fever,'' J. Paul married five times (once bigamously), sired five children (of record), and had many, many mistresses. He also succumbed to the charms of Europe and European nobility, neither of which appealed to his provincial pa. Not put off by the disapproving last will and testament, J. Paul eventually got his hands on the old man's money (through his doting mother, Sarah, the principal beneficiary) and parlayed that modest fortune into what Pearson terms an ``outrageous'' one—over a billion dollars in personal assets. All of which might have been a mere twist on the American dream if it weren't for the utter mess J. Paul made of his personal life—or, rather, the lives of everyone closest to him. Getty had almost nothing to do with his sons until they were old enough to take part in the family business. But even then, J. Paul played favorites and pitted brother against brother until the eldest, George, committed suicide, and his half-brother, Paul Junior, became a drug addict. But the cruelest lot fell to one of the next generation: Jean Paul III, who was kidnapped for five months in Italy, lost an ear while his grandfather refused to pay the $17 million ransom, became an alcoholic, eventually fell into a coma, and emerged almost blind and quadriplegic. Pop-journalistic, unbalanced in favor of those who seem to have cooperated with the author (who offers no source notes), notably Paul Junior's ex-wife, Gail, and an absorbing read. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Marie Claire)
Pub Date: Nov. 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13579-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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