A flat account of America's Gilded Age and the life of one of its major players. Frick (18491919) was born to a respectable middle- class farming family in Pennsylvania. He announced at a very young age that he planned to be worth a million dollars before he died, and by the time he was 30, he had more than achieved this early ambition. Frick entered the business world at age 14, working in his uncle's general store. At 17, he moved to the exciting young industrial city of Pittsburgh and became a salesman of trimmings for ladies' apparel, later taking a job as bookkeeper at his grandfather's distillery. It was not until Frick was 21 that he began working toward his financial goal in earnest. He learned of the coke business through his cousin, Abraham Overholt Tintsman, who saw no prospects for the coal by- product. But Frick grasped the potential in coke, which could be used in the steel-making process. Thanks to the railroad boom, steel rails were much in demand—a fact that men like Andrew Carnegie used to their great advantage. Frick convinced his cousin that they should buy more coal land and build more ovens to produce the coke that Carnegie needed, and in 1872 H.C. Frick and Company came into existence. The firm weathered the recession of 1873 and eventually merged with Carnegie's steel works; Frick managed the whole conglomeration. Schreiner (A Place Called Princeton, 1984) devotes much of his book to the disputes between Frick and Carnegie, and the careers of the period's great businessmen, giving Frick himself fairly short shrift. The magnate is presented as an austere man, a brilliant manager who was hard on workers, and representative of the early success and great wealth, allied with a sense of civic duty, typical of his time, but the text never delves very deeply into his character. A dry, sterile tale.
Pub Date: April 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11821-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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