A former RD managing editor traces the rise and fall of the service magazine that became America's social mirror and later a rich orphan for profiteers. Wisely, Canning centers this story on the magazine's founders: Lila Acheson and DeWitt Wallace. As young adults, each followed idealistic paths: she doing social mission work, he aiming to publish a magazine that would get at ``the nub of things''—The Reader's Digest. Months after their marriage in 1921, they published the first issue; 15 years later, despite the Depression, they reached nearly two million households. Yet chinks in the armor appeared. WW II brought a new relationship with US intelligence that would continue for decades and affect articles and even editors. By the late 1930s, the marriage eroded; there were never to be natural children (a result of his WW I wound), but arguments over their ``child'' RD abounded. Still, circulation and an empire of magazine, sweepstakes, and condensed books grew. Not until the Wallaces' age necessitated the formation of a group of directors did the essential mission of the magazine fall. Philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller, who had pet plans for the Wallace money, salesmen-executives who felt marketing RD was like selling any product, and lawyer Barney McHenry, who sought control, comprised the team that funneled two-thirds of Wallace funds ($2.5 billion) to largely non-Wallace purposes. Under them and their hires, tens of hundreds of RD workers were fired, forced to sell stock, or denied pensions. Symbolically, the ashes of the deceased Wallace (d. 1981) and Lila (d. 1984) were dumped unceremoniously, not dusted over their rose garden, as they had desired. Insider that he is, Canning reports the RD demise with anger, sadness, and contempt, which, supported with diligent research and strong storytelling (the RD way), makes for heartfelt and believable reading.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80928-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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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