Fascinating, outrageous, factual saga of America's powerful beer barons—the Busch family of St. Louis. Adolphus Busch—wine connoisseur and scorner of his flagship beer, Budweiser (``Ach, dot schlop?''), battler of Prohibition and shrewd judge of human nature (``Another bad trait in the American's character is hypocrisy. He recommends...prohibition...while at the same time drinks like a fish and becomes drunk as a fool''), influence purchaser (Pres. Taft rewarded Busch's campaign-help by appointing Busch's personal lawyer secretary of commerce)—arrived in St. Louis from Germany in 1857. By his death, he had founded a family dynasty that today has the lion's share of the US beer market (and a CEO earning $22 million in 1988). With more than 200 interviews and several thousand pages of public and private documents, Hernon and Ganey (special projects reporter and state capital bureau chief, respectively, for the St. Louis Post Dispatch) show how the succeeding five generations of this family made enough connections—Adolph Hitler; Al Capone; Presidents Taft, T. Roosevelt, FDR, Truman—and created enough scandals—drug addiction, alcoholism, illegitimate children, ear-ripping assault, murder over homosexual liaison—to dwarf the peccadilloes of the Kennedys. And all this while keeping the cork in the bottle! The authors had difficulty gaining access to the current chief—August R. Busch—whose principal bogeyman is what he calls the ``neoprohibitionist'' movement. Busch, it seems, has good reasons to fear probing. For example, during the 60's, Anheuser-Busch hired a team at the Univ. of Penn.'s Wharton School to study drinking behavior. The result was a profile of four types of drinkers, two of which drank to escape personal or social failure. The advertising then zeroed in on these ``target market segments'' with splendid success. Adroitly told, fresh, provocative, with plenty of froth and also substance; certain to excite comment. (Thirty-two pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 24, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-69024-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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
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
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