A potentially lively human-interest story of three generations of very rich, largely unpleasant men is marred by content and...
Sprawling tale of the fortunes and misfortunes of the Bronfman family, who transformed themselves from bootleggers to billionaires in a single generation.
Samuel Bronfman was an infant when his Russian-Jewish family emigrated to Canada in 1889. With the help of the Prohibition Act of 1920, within two years of its 1933 repeal, the Bronfmans had amassed an astonishing fortune, worth billions in today’s dollars. Mr. Sam, as he was widely known, had a head for business, a refined taste for spirits, a heart quick to anger and a ruthless need for control that would lead him to consolidate absolute power over his siblings in the House of Seagram. But a lifelong yearning to escape the taint of his bootlegger past would be forever frustrated, in part by the anti-Semitism of the era’s polite Canadian society. His son Edgar would gain the respectability his father long sought, as president of the World Jewish Congress. Edgar’s son and heir, Edgar Jr., eventually lost, via a series of spectacular strategic disasters while jockeying with the big players of Wall Street, the family’s ownership of the business his grandfather created and his father nurtured. Former Economist editor Faith (Blaze, 2000, etc.) is as fascinated by the minutiae of the distilling industry as he is by high-stakes financial gamesmanship. Readers who do not share his passion for the intricacies of straight whiskey versus blends, or for the role of EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortization) in evaluating corporate profitability may find his narrative to be at times hopelessly leaden with incidental trivia.
A potentially lively human-interest story of three generations of very rich, largely unpleasant men is marred by content and style better suited to a trade publication than something seeking a consumer audience.Pub Date: June 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-33219-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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