A veteran pilot's affectionate, anecdotal take on the slow death of Pan American World Airways, which, in the unsentimental language of the trade, went ``Tango Uniform'' (``tits up'') at the end of 1991. Before recounting the global carrier's lengthy descent into oblivion, Gandt (who made a host of friends and contacts during the 26 years he flew for the airline) recalls its glory years, when legendary Juan Trippe ruled the roost. An often infuriating innovator, Trippe (known in-house as the Great Dissembler) helped found Pan Am in 1927. With wise counsel from Charles Lindbergh, he pushed his company from the flying boats and stratocruisers that bracketed the WW II era into the jet age, in the process convincing Boeing that it made economic as well as operational sense to build the 747 jumbo jet. Under his visionary, if occasionally vague, stewardship, Pan Am prospered. But, according to Gandt, the company became convinced that it was as much an institution as a commercial enterprise. The author dates the painfully slow eclipse of Pan Am's Skygod status from the mid-1960s, when the company bought more jets than it could fly at a profit. Trippe stepped down about this time as well, and his successors weren't up to the job of running an international carrier. During the competitive period that followed deregulation of the US air-transport industry, in fact, several made fatal mistakes: ill-advised acquisitions (in an attempt to gain domestic routes); market miscalculations; adversarial labor relations; and divestiture of crown-jewel assets (including Pacific routes) at fire-sale prices. The terrorist bomb that blasted flight 103 from the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, along with the Gulf War, caused even more passengers than usual to shun Pan Am and finally put paid to its very existence. With a full ration of fine yarns from the cockpit and flight line, a genial requiem for a once consequential heavyweight.
Pub Date: March 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-04615-0
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
With wide-ranging research and her bull's-eye wit, New York Newsday columnist Lord celebrates as she satirizes the myth and magic, the life and times of Mattel's immortal girl toy. Barbie was born in 1959, the product of a confluence of factors: postwar America's booming marketplace for boomer children, conflicting ideas about women, and the revolution in plastics. Lord's account covers two aspects of Barbie's nature: ``doll-as- physical-object'' and ``doll-as-invented-personality.'' The story of Barbie as physical object is a coming-of-age story involving the rise (thanks to entrepreneurial chutzpah) and fall (resulting from SEC violations) of Barbie's inventor, Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler. It touches on international trade (Barbie's first dress designer, Seventh Avenue denizen Charlotte Johnson, spent a year in Tokyo overseeing the creation of the doll's original 22 outfits), unprecented industry expansion as evidenced by Mattel's growth, and innovations in advertising, merchandising, and promotion, such as motivational researcher Ernest Dichter's early study of Barbie's appeal to girls and their mothers (Barbie ``could be a cute decoration for a man's bar,'' said one unenthusiastic mother). The story of Barbie as invented personality—the promotional brainstorm that created Barbie's persona as a living female—is a coming-of-a- new-age story. It involves the increasingly dissonant notions about woman's power and place, as well as growing racial and ethnic awareness. Barbie's voluptuous body, says Lord, along with her various incarnations, including fashion model and photographer, made her a ``brave, new, vaguely selfish and decidedly subversive heroine'' in the mold of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl. Barbie never had a husband; she earned her own keep and always wore a smile (and a fabulous outfit). True, Mattel introduced a boyfriend for her in 1961, but Ken ``was a mere accessory,'' Lord cracks, ``a drip with seriously abridged genitalia who wasn't very important in her life.'' Lord's intelligence and good humor bring a new attitude to feminist visions of popular culture and the women who love it. (65 photos, 15 in color, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-12296-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This biography, much discussed even before its publication, is as mammoth as Brando himself—and a compelling read. Most of the details supplied by Manso (Mailer: His Life and Times, 1985, etc.) regarding Brando's myriad peccadilloes, sexual and otherwise, are essential for a complete picture of an unusually complex and distasteful human being: self-absorbed, manipulative, a poor parent, and a user of women. (No doubt Brando will present a different picture in his autobiography, which Random House will publish this month; no advance galleys are available.) Born in 1924, Brando was the son of two ill-matched alcoholics. His mother, with whom he had an almost incestuously close relationship, was a free-thinking bohemian; his father was a pompous businessman with a penchant for shady dealing. Brando was a troubled and troublesome boy who was thrown out of several schools and never got a high school diploma (though he later became a voracious reader). When he moved to New York City to pursue the theater as a career, it was his close relationship with Stella Adler, who taught him acting, that grounded him. After receiving excellent notices in several smaller parts, his dazzling performance in A Streetcar Named Desire led him to Hollywood, where, as Manso observes, he established ``his indelible, transcendent image as a genius among actors.'' Manso is good at eliciting from Brando's colleagues a sense of his unusual working methods and startling flair for improvisation on camera. Regrettably, Brando's ambivalence about his work and his self-indulgence off camera resulted in a self-loathing that affected his acting. Until The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, most people in the film industry were prepared to write him off as a spent bullet. Manso traces Brando's involvement in the American Indian Movement, his long-standing love affair with Tahiti, and the gruesome story of the shooting of his daughter's boyfriend by her half-brother Christian. To Manso's credit, the book is neither a hatchet job nor a bronzing. His biggest weakness is an inability to relate the actor to his times in a specific way, falling back instead on a laundry list of current events. Nevertheless, a page-turner that will fascinate even Brando's detractors—maybe especially them. (First serial rights to Vanity Fair)
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1994
ISBN: 0-7868-6063-4
Page Count: 1120
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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