An engaging if cursory memoir from Neuberger, who at age 94 is still going strong in the challenging worlds of finance and philanthropy. Following a comfortable childhood in New York City, Neuberger (who was orphaned at 13) dropped out of college to work as a fabrics buyer at B. Altman, a carriage-trade retailer. A young man of independent means, he subsequently settled in Paris, where his tennis skills and interest in the fine arts ensured him an active social life. He returned to Manhattan in 1929, just months before the stock market crash, and joined a brokerage house called Halle & Stieglitz. Despite hard times on Wall Street and Main Street, Neuberger prospered in his chosen career and managed to preserve the capital that had been left to him. By now married with children, Neuberger (in partnership with Robert B. Berman) opened his own firm in 1940. Nearly six decades later, the firm occupies a secure niche in the ultracompetitive securities business, largely on the strength of its co-founder's skills at value investing, and can claim credit for creating one of the industry's first no-load mutual funds (Guardian). During the late 1940s, Neuberger began to buy the works of contemporary painters (Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Peter Hurd, et al.). The quality and quantity of his acquisitions led Nelson Rockefeller (then governor of New York) to build him an eponymous museum on the state university's new campus in Purchase in return for his collection. Complete with tips on achieving longevity, financial security, and emotional satisfaction, an elder statesman's look back in obvious pleasure, albeit no great depth, on a fulfilling life.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-471-17186-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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
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