California historian Davis (Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles, 1993) revisits Teapot Dome, the cause cÇläbre that began in the time of Warren Harding, to tell the story of one of the scandal’s prominent actors, now largely forgotten. As the Gilded Age turned into the Jazz Age, Edward Doheny, hitherto a feckless prospector, peered into the La Brea tar pits and saw a fortune. He punched the first hole for oil in the city of Los Angeles. Successful, he turned to wildcat drilling in the jungles of Mexico. Gusher followed gusher and the shrewd Doheny became wonderfully rich, the master of a great mansion, a private railroad car, and all the accoutrements of great wealth. It was a world of puissant bigwigs, of powerful cronies, extravagantly mustachioed. It happened one day that the oilman transmitted $100,000 in cash to a cash-poor old crony, Albert Fall, who was then Harding’s secretary of the interior. He called it a loan. Just about the same time, the Department of the Interior granted Doheny’s company favorable leases in fields dedicated to naval oil reserves. Harry Sinclair, another oilman, obtained similar leases in a field known as Teapot Dome for its odd rock formation. When the deals came to light, a battle between conservationists and exploiters erupted. A Senate investigation turned the transactions into scandal, and civil and criminal trials followed. Fall took the Fifth, but was jailed anyway. Sinclair did time, too. Doheny, though, was found innocent of any criminality. His story and that of his family and friends is told expertly, though with a clearly sympathetic bias, while some questions remain (e.g., why was the “loan” made in cash?). Drawing on a new-found trove of Doheny’s personal correspondence, and well researched and narrated, this revisionist biography is an interesting addition to the social history of the times. (50 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-520-20292-9
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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