A blue-chip biography that not only brings Warren Edward Buffett to vivid life but also pays detailed tribute to the integrity, patience, and acumen that have made the low-key Nebraskan arguably the greatest investor ever. While Wall Street Journal correspondent Lowenstein was unable to secure Buffett's cooperation, the Midas-touch money manager did not actively oppose the project. Accordingly, the author was able to produce a well-rounded portrait of Buffett with help from his family, friends, and colleagues, as well as the public record. A son of the heartland (and a US congressman who represented a staunchly Republican district in Omaha), the future financier was precociously numerate and interested in the stock market from an early age. At Columbia University's graduate school of business, he studied under Benjamin Graham, an idol whose securities-analysis doctrines remain valid in a global-investment arena where professionals have a range of theories that owe more to computer assistance than common sense. Back in his hometown, Buffett (who turns 65 this year) employed Graham's bedrock principles of value to amass small fortunes for himself and those with enough faith to commit to his private partnerships. Lowenstein provides a coherent account of how Buffett went on to make his current fiefdom (Berkshire Hathaway) the most expensive equity on the New York Stock Exchange, thanks to sizable, shrewdly timed positions in American Express, Capital Cities/ABC, Coca-Cola, and other immensely rewarding issues. Covered as well are Buffett's precious few errors, e.g., a substantive stake in scandal-ridden Salomon Brothers. Nor does the author shy away from Buffett's nontraditional stylenotable, among other matters, for a live-in mistress and cordial relations with an earth-mother wife from whom he is separated but not divorced. An engrossing, diligently documented audit of a billionaire who gained great wealth the old-fashioned way, i.e., by earning it. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41584-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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