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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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