Whyte capably charts Hearst’s trajectory to the early 1900s, so there’s plenty left for a sequel. Meanwhile, this volume is...
Literate biography of the real-life Citizen Kane.
William Randolph Hearst parlayed a fortunate early life—his father was a U.S. senator, his mother a famed socialite—into a fortune, though his vehicle was an unusual one in a time of robber barons, railroad and shipping magnates and great bankers. As Maclean’s publisher and editor-in-chief Whyte shows, Hearst, shut out of his father’s will, bought a struggling New York daily newspaper, the Morning Journal, and turned it into a muckraking tabloid, sometime force for social good and advertising moneymaker that pushed him to prominence. Hearst was a hands-on publisher whose journalistic method might be called Social Darwinist. While running a San Francisco newspaper at the start of his career, he called, for instance, for “men who come out west in the hopeful buoyancy of youth for the purpose of making their fortunes and not a worthless scum that has been carried there by the eddies of repeated failures.” For all the flaws Orson Welles would rightly ascribe to him, Hearst was a model publisher, as Whyte clearly appreciates. At all his newspapers, he was closely involved with not only the daily content but also with design, advertising, circulation, staffing and every other aspect of its operations. He also insisted on hiring the best writers he could find, and he let them write. Somewhere along the way, when the riches poured in and the political power accrued, Hearst determined to bring his white-man’s-burden message home, gaining renown—notoriety, many would say—for turning his budding newspaper empire to the cause of overthrowing the last of the Spanish Empire, eagerly advocating the armed interventions that would become known as the Spanish-American War.
Whyte capably charts Hearst’s trajectory to the early 1900s, so there’s plenty left for a sequel. Meanwhile, this volume is a solid entry in the history of journalism, and of the American Empire.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58243-467-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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