Heiress Marjorie Post was many things during her long life, but ``empress'' seems an overstatement. Post was one of the wealthiest women in the United States, but her life as described by journalist Rubin is hardly riveting. The most interesting character in this biography is her father, C.W. Post, an ambitious and inventive man who gave us the coffee substitute Postum and Grape Nuts cereal, the products on which the Post fortune was based. After her father committed suicide, Marjorie inherited Postum Cereals but, because she was a woman, felt she could not even sit on her own company's board of directors. She did insist that Postum Cereals buy a small business run by a man named Clarence Birdseye; in 1929, Postum incorporated Birdseye Frosted Foods and became the General Foods Corporation. Despite that business success, Post always considered her proper role to be wife and mother. She had four husbands: Edward Close, scion of an old-line Connecticut family and father of two of her daughters; E.F. Hutton, who built the famous brokerage firm and fathered her third daughter, actress Dina Merrill; US ambassador to Russia Joseph Davies; and business executive Herbert May. Marjorie shone as a hostess and homemaker, with establishments from the Adirondacks to the renowned Mar-a- Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. Her four-masted yacht, Sea Cloud, caused one of the few scandals in her life: It carried a cargo of luxury foods to Moscow to stock embassy larders when the strained Russian economy was short on staples. The yacht was later loaned to the US Navy for the duration of WW II, a public gesture atypical of Post's usually quiet generosity. When she died in 1973 aged 86, she had since grown deaf but was still flirting with idea of a fifth husband. Post's life was eventful, but Rubin's conventional narrative fails to convince one that it is a life worth writing about. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Town & Country)
Pub Date: Jan. 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41347-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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