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TAKING ON THE TRUST

THE EPIC BATTLE OF IDA TARBELL AND JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

Rockefeller remains a sketchy figure, but Tarbell emerges as a remarkably intelligent, diligent and principled woman with...

Pointed contrasting portraits of the pioneering investigative journalist and the titan of industry.

Weinberg (Journalism/Univ. of Missouri; Telling the Untold Story: How Investigative Reporters are Changing the Craft of Biography, 1992, etc.) recounts the connections that both figures had with the oil industry: Tarbell (1857–1944) grew up around the oil fields of Titusville, Pa., and witnessed the effects on her father’s small business of the growing trust established by Rockefeller (1839–1937). The author contrasts their childhoods: Rockefeller’s was unstable, his mother harsh, his father a conman and a bigamist; Tarbell had a traditional middle-class background. Weinberg shows Rockefeller struggling to get an education and Tarbell becoming a biology major at Allegheny College, the only female graduate in the class of 1880. He then follows Tarbell’s subsequent career as editor and reporter for the Chautauquan, her years as a freelance journalist in Paris and her move to New York City to become an editor and investigative journalist for McClure’s magazine. (Rockefeller mostly drops out of the narrative here.) After producing two circulation-boosting series on Napoleon and Lincoln, she tackled Standard Oil, writing a serialized exposé of the trust’s business practices that when published in book form became her most famous work, The History of the Standard Oil Company. The author details Tarbell’s painstaking research into government documents, court records, newspaper files and church records, as well as her extensive interviews with Standard Oil executive Henry Rogers; extensive quotations reveal the eloquence and clarity of her prose. Tarbell’s investigation, Weinberg reminds us, aroused public resentment against Rockefeller and Standard Oil that led to the government’s legal actions against the petroleum trust and eventually to its breakup in 1911.

Rockefeller remains a sketchy figure, but Tarbell emerges as a remarkably intelligent, diligent and principled woman with great independence of spirit.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-393-04935-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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