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
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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