An old saw about Hollywood has it that if you scrape away the phoney tinsel, you'll find the real tinsel underneath. On the evidence of the would-be hiss-and-tell exposÇ at hand, much the same could be said of Donald Trump, the casino real-estate operator who's now adrift in a sea of financial woes. By the author's evenhanded, knowledgable account, in fact, Trump is a decidedly dull boy whose life story could as easily have been subtitled ``The Banality of Narcissism.'' The son of a top gaming-industry executive, O'Donnell (now 36) grew up in the slot-machine business. A sometime protÇgÇ of Steve Wynn, he signed on with The Donald's organization in 1987. As chief operating officer at Trump Plaza, O'Donnell was in almost daily contact with his boss. If familiarity did not breed contempt, it eventually led to distaste. Trump at work emerges here as a cocksure boor who pays precious little attention to detail and pins the blame for his own misjudgments on subordinates. While he seems surprisingly dumb when it comes to weighing a deal's downside risks against its potential rewards, he apparently suffers from near- terminal overconfidence. As O'Donnell makes clear, however, his empire was built on an abiding faith in rising property values, an assumption that came a cropper shortly after the Taj Mahal's botched opening. And Trump at play with his yacht, helicopter, and other trophies is an equally unappealing eminence. A lover of gossip, The Donald has a phobia about germs, which makes him reluctant to shake hands with high-rolling customers or mingle with the celebs he adores and caters to. Nor does the abstemious Trump have a talent for extramarital flings. A long-running, oddly joyous affair with Marla Maples cost him his marriage to Ivana—and a good deal more. At any rate, O'Donnel quit Trump cold about a year ago. Now employed at Merv Griffith's Resorts Casino Hotel, he's watched from afar as Trump's sagging fortunes have attested to the truth of Hardy's contention that character is fate. An insider's saavy appraisal of a lad who lierally grew too big for his britches; no real surprises or new dirt for attentive readers of tabloid and business news, but a slick piece of work that will almost surely attract attention.
Pub Date: June 10, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-73735-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
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
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