Despite some puffery, this is a readable portrait of a remarkable individual.
Inspiring story of a woman who is using her wealth for philanthropy.
At 82, Warren Buffett’s older sister, Doris, has contributed more than $100 million in support of battered women, sick children, the mentally ill and others through a highly personal style of giving that sets her Sunshine Lady Foundation apart from larger organizations staffed with trained professionals. In this admiring account—more tribute than biography—Zitz, a reporter with the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., where Doris Buffett lives, describes her difficult life and her success as a philanthropist since inheriting her mother’s Berkshire Hathaway shares in 1996. Writing with Doris’s cooperation, Zitz tells an upbeat story of charitable giving that has its roots in this bright and attractive woman’s misfortunes. Emotionally abused by a mother who apparently disliked her children, Doris was made to feel stupid and unloved (“I never heard the words ‘I love you,’ ” she writes). She struggled through four disastrous marriages and depression, nearly lost her home in the 1987 stock-market crash, had cancer twice and remains estranged from her children. Now, writes Zitz, she wants “poor children, sick kids and abused women to experience a little happiness” through her targeted gifts that help them weather crises and move ahead on their own. Friends and other nonprofessionals help her vet letters from the needy to select recipients. The book offers intriguing glimpses of young Warren Buffett—he provides a foreword—and describes how Doris became an anti-communist activist and Barry Goldwater supporter in the early ’60s to have something to talk about with her dying father, a Republican Congressman. The author offers moving examples of Doris’s philanthropy and rightly praises her support of prisoner education at Sing Sing and San Quentin prisons, among other causes shunned by most of her peers. Having learned what matters the hard way, she is determined to give all her money away to others who have also been unlucky in life.
Despite some puffery, this is a readable portrait of a remarkable individual.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57962-209-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
