A smoothly written, comprehensive life of a man at once complex and superficial—truly an icon of the modern age.
Hailed in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Henry Ford was “an American icon”—and, argues historian Watts, the principal architect of American consumer culture.
Born on a Michigan farm in 1863, Ford did not want for much; the crops were good, and his mother imparted to him a Victorian ethic that “forged a creed combining Protestant moralism, market individualism, the work ethic, and genteel restraint.” The McGuffey Readers did their part, too, as did Thomas Edison, whom Ford met after having developed a prototype car in 1896. Edison approved of his design, exclaiming, “Your car is self-contained—it carries its own power-plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke, no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it.” Ford took from Edison a certainty that technology could yield social good and wealth by improving the lot of the workers, as well as reinforcement for his own views on the virtues of hard work and frugality. He eventually turned social engineer, using some of his immense wealth to fund anti-tobacco and anti-alcohol crusades, all in the name of good business and efficiency; he once remarked that he would never hire a manager who looked to be worn or in bad shape, reckoning that such a fellow would use Ford’s money as poorly as he did his own body. About the time Ford’s business practices—don’t allow unions, but pay well, and the like—were being lauded in totalitarian Germany and Leninist Russia as the face of the industrial future, Ford expanded his extracurricular interests to include railing against Jews; as with his adoption of fad diets and spiritualist causes, Watts observes, Ford “offered a mishmash of half-digested concepts and visceral intuitions, rather than systematic analysis, so his social and cultural speculations did not probe very deeply.” Deeply enough, though, to lose market share and political influence—and to have his name forever associated with despicable causes as much as remembered for his very real achievements.
A smoothly written, comprehensive life of a man at once complex and superficial—truly an icon of the modern age.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40735-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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