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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
