And with that—and herein lies the takeaway of this valuable book—every ounce of integrity seemed to disappear from the world...
Economic historian Ferguson (History/Harvard Univ.; The Ascent of Money, 2008, etc.) turns to the last of the high financiers of old, before the hedge-funders of Wall Street took over the world.
Siegmund Warburg (1902–1982), writes the author, was on the face “no more or less than a very successful London banker.” Yet he was much more than that. Having chronicled the Rothschilds in a wide-ranging set of books, Ferguson finds Warburg a kindred figure as a German Jew who immigrated to England and built a fortune “with a combination of intelligence and industry,” building a powerful merchant bank from the ground up and using it to reshape the financial practices of the time. Like the Rothschilds, too, Warburg used his fortune to expand into other arenas, acquired considerable political influence and became a prominent philanthropist, funding many good-works organizations in Great Britain and Israel. Warburg was an enthusiastic citizen of both nations, but also, unlike many of his generation, was a “committed Atlanticist” who welcomed the integration of the European and North American economies, spending as much of his time in New York City as in the great financial capitals of Europe. Apart from that, Warburg was a patron of the arts and culture, a bibliophile and a scholar who remarked that had necessity not pushed him into the business of making a living, he would have happily lived out his days as a poor intellectual—though it certainly helped that his family had been in the banking business since the Napoleonic Wars. For all his success in the world of haute banque, however, Warburg enjoyed a type of career that would be replaced by a different kind of banking in the go-go days of deregulation and speculation. In the end, writes Ferguson, the house he built was sold for pence on the pound.
And with that—and herein lies the takeaway of this valuable book—every ounce of integrity seemed to disappear from the world of high finance. Readable, accessible and not a little nostalgic.Pub Date: June 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59420-246-9
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2011
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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