A scattershot rant whose targets range from feckless CEOs and venal Wall Streeters through conspicuous consumers. Using the righteous B.C. Forbes and his high-living son Malcolm (of Forbes magazine fame) as models, von Hoffman (Organized Crimes, 1984, etc.) offers a discontinuous critique of American commerce over the past 150 years or so. His working premise seems to be that the captains of US industry aren't what they used to be- -and that the country is the worse for it. Von Hoffman glorifies such pioneering capitalists as Andrew Carnegie, Pierre du Pont, J.P Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, David Sarnoff, Charles Schwab, Alfred Sloan, Theodore Vail, and Thomas Watson, Sr., while heaping scorn on their contemporary counterparts. The author's latter-day whipping boys include the likes of William Agee, Harold Geneen, Armand Hammer, Carl Icahn, Henry Kravis, Carl Lindner, Michael Milken, T. Boone Pickens, Jr., and Steven Ross. Asserting that, for all their faults, yesteryear's avatars of free enterprise left society richer than they found it, von Hoffman accuses today's professional managers and financial speculators of focusing on the main chance. Among other consequences, he charges, the opportunism pervading domestic business has helped create an entertainment- oriented generation more concerned with celebrity and glamour than accomplishment. Indeed, the author warns, the nation ``has come close to turning itself into a huge Kuwait.'' Whatever the merits of von Hoffman's notion that Big Business has precipitated a decline in initiative, he doesn't make much of a case for it. Save for one brief allusion to Microsoft's William Gates, for example, the author all but ignores the impact of microelectronic technology on the modern era. A one-note harangue, then, that sounds more like Miniver Cheevy than Jeremiah.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-41674-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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
SEEN & HEARD
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