A thorough baby boomer account about business and family.
A writer recounts memories of his life, family, and career in the computer industry in this debut memoir.
As one reaches the end of a long and eventful life, it makes sense to record a bit of it for posterity. That’s what Eckhaus has done here: “I am going to try and document some of the things that I remember and what I have learned over these seventy-five years—how I remember my life—from the beginning, including what life was like in general, and for me as I was growing up.” Beginning with a brief history of his parents and grandparents (European Jews who settled in New York), the author describes growing up in Newburgh, New York, in the 1950s; hanging around with his gang of friends, the Botonos; and meeting his high school sweetheart (and future wife), Linda. After college, Eckhaus became interested in the relatively new field of computers, working at IBM and eventually founding industry groups like AFCOM and the Data Center Institute. He eventually discovered a passion for Republican Party politics and, in particular, for Israel. Perhaps most surprising of all is that late in life he founded a small record label—mostly as a favor to singer and friend Clint Holmes—and helped produce a song that earned two Grammy nominations in 2018. Eckhaus’ prose is friendly and direct: “Linda and I had always enjoyed live theater and now that I could afford it, we bought season tickets to a variety of performances at a number of wonderful venues. We had season tickets to a Broadway theater series at the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa.” The author is interested in documenting both success and failure, and while he seems to have more experience with the former than the latter, he wishes to share the intriguing tidbits he learned from his mistakes. Eckhaus began this book as a resource for his own descendants, and those will likely be the readers most captivated by the minutiae of his life (and there are a lot of details contained in these pages). The general audience will perhaps have a bit harder time finding relevance in this work.
A thorough baby boomer account about business and family.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 451
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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