But the Empire State Building rises above it all, too beloved a symbol to be smeared by the cheesy world of trophy real...
For a skyscraper of such totemic presence, the Empire State Building has plenty of low-rent skeletons in its closets, as explained by Wall Street Journal reporter Pacelle in this snappy history of the edifice’s ownership.
Product of the pie-in-the-sky real-estate world of the Roaring ’20s, the Empire State Building is a survivor: of the winding-sheet economy of the Depression, of a B-52 crashing into its side, of a legion of suicides dancing off its observation deck, of the neglect of the Helmsley era. And though business seldom rewards monument-building—ego being the undoing of economic sense—the building has never been short of suitors. Pacelle’s history can read like the breathless columns of the society page, but he certainly delivers the dirty goods on those who have put the building in their ownership sights. Except for a brief period when it was unclear who actually owned it, the real story has been the 114-year lease held on the Empire State Building, now by Leona Helmsley and Peter Malkin. No one wants to sink millions into an investment that will be paying savings-bank returns for decades, but when Hideki Yokoi went for the building in the early 1990s, after the yen went ballistic and the Japanese went on a trophy-hunting binge in the US, he understood that “leases were meant to be broken.” His daughter turned out to be his real problem. Donald Trump entered the fray, portending a showdown between “The Donald” and “The Queen of Mean,” but that fizzled in the courts. Indeed, the weakness of Pacelle’s otherwise enjoyable tale is the amount of time spent in real-estate court and the number of offshore companies and false fronts that must be negotiated to understand the machinations of the principals.
But the Empire State Building rises above it all, too beloved a symbol to be smeared by the cheesy world of trophy real estate.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-40394-6
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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