Solid storytelling brought to bear on a dusty corner of financial history.
In which a proto-yuppie out of a Tarkington novel gets his comeuppance—sort of.
James Hazen Hyde, writes journalist Beard (Good Daughters, 1999, etc.), had it all: charm, good looks, and lots and lots of money. By his late 20s, bottom-feeding in a Wall Street run by the likes of J.P. Morgan, Alfred Vanderbilt, and E.H. Harriman, he had become a senior officer in the Equitable Life Assurance Society and a director of no fewer than 46 companies, all of which netted him an income so vast that he was able, in the early 1900s, to pay an annual upkeep on a mansion in the neighborhood of $100,000, complete with a huge collection of carriages and other toys. Just as perp-walked executives of today insist that they came by their fortunes honestly and poor accounting was to blame for company woes, Hyde protested his own straight-upness when, in the wake of a lavish party he threw in 1905, his comfortable world dissolved in a vast scandal; when the books were finally balanced, it was revealed that millions had gone missing, including $7 million alone in the mysterious category “for other disbursements.” Hyde high-tailed it to Europe, marrying well and producing a son who became a leading figure in the Cold War intelligence community. In his later years, clad in a cape and spats, the statute of limitations presumably up, he could be seen wandering the streets of New York; he made for good gossip, “and if he was an odd duck,” Beard writes, “he was also a sophisticated, entertaining, fascinating dinner partner.” Was he the Ken Lay of his time? The evidence is spotty, but Beard depcits well the Gilded Age and its spectacular excesses—and in an age of corporate scandal, it’s comforting somehow to know that legions of the crooked have gone before us.
Solid storytelling brought to bear on a dusty corner of financial history.Pub Date: July 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019939-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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