A masterful approach to composition combines with a fascinating plot and makes its subject entertaining as well as...
A unique competition between two scions of the Gilded Age is the driver for this fresh look at the mores of the rich and powerful.
The aim of the competition was to acquire the world's most complicated timepieces. The contenders were Ward Packard, founder of the eponymous luxury automobile brand, and Henry Graves, a financier whose family's money was made in railroads, coal, cement and lumber. Packard commissioned pieces to his own specification, while Graves desired to be the owner of the best. Former Time writer Perman (In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-the-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain that Breaks All the Rules, 2010, etc.) applies her investigative skills and attention to detail to a sharply focused but wide-ranging account of the behind-the-scenes struggle as it was waged through the precision engineering and technical expertise of Europe's greatest watchmaking establishments, such as Patek-Philippe, Breguet and Vacheron Constantin. The author also includes a history of time-keeping and watchmaking, through the invention of mechanical action and the later competition to locate longitude. Perman documents how America's wealthy replaced Europe's royalty and aristocrats as patrons of the watchmakers. She effectively combines these different strands, providing a compelling social history, especially during the years before and after the stock market crash of 1929, as the collections were assembled, then dispersed and are now being reconstituted by the very companies that first made them.
A masterful approach to composition combines with a fascinating plot and makes its subject entertaining as well as compelling.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9008-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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