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 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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