But Murdoch is nothing if not a survivor, and Chenoweth’s lively biography pays due respect to a slippery but tenacious...
A roller-coaster ride through the life and self-made world of the Australian billionaire.
Sydney-based financial journalist Chenoweth explains that Murdoch is a bundle of contradictions: personally unprepossessing (“drab to the point of colorlessness”) yet a master of Machiavellian business politics; morally ambiguous (quick to betray friends and family for the promise of money or other pleasures) yet the architect of one of the world’s great media empires, embracing satellite and cable television, newspapers, radio stations, and a host of other ventures. This success, Chenoweth notes, was never quite preordained, although Murdoch was heir to the distressed fortunes of a distant father who himself had built such an empire in Australia; it took Murdoch’s singular drive and ambition to expand these slender holdings to embrace every continent—and to make few friends and many enemies along the way. Showing guarded admiration for Murdoch’s talents and refusing to demonize his much-despised subject, Chenoweth takes us along some impressively complex paths, including Murdoch’s bid in the fall of 2001 to acquire Hughes Electronics from a battered GM and his longtime efforts to thwart Ted Turner’s ambitions to build an omnimedia empire of his own. Along the way, he offers learned observations of interest to anyone contemplating investment in a Murdoch venture: he notes, for instance, that Murdoch’s fortunes seem to be keyed to the calendar, such that “Murdoch would spend the first years of each decade recovering from his latest great gamble. By the middle of the decade he would have settled the empire down, beaten back the bankers, and embarked on the next growth phase. The deals grew dizzier and dizzier until by the end of the decade Murdoch’s news empire would look impossibly stretched, his critics declaring that this time this crisis would be his last.”
But Murdoch is nothing if not a survivor, and Chenoweth’s lively biography pays due respect to a slippery but tenacious fellow.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-61038-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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