Outrageous as he is, for personality and readability, Redstone gets an A.
A robust autobiography by the self-styled owner and CEO of media conglomerate Viacom (published, incidentally, by the company’s book subsidiary).
The Redstone legend, played up from many angles in the business and celebrity media, is treated here to a richly suggestive and selective retelling, true to the biz-bio mode. The oldest son of demanding, supportive parents, Redstone grew up an overachiever and has kept accelerating. He was a high-profile Washington lawyer by his early 30s, but he traded in his safe profession for a business opportunity, joining his dad’s drive-in theater start-up. With steely temperament and confidence, Redstone recounts how he successfully built up a regional industry leader through equal applications of effort and chutzpah: He mercilessly pursued the Hollywood studios, like David against Goliath, while making West Coast alliances that leveraged Viacom’s steep growth trajectory. It was a brutal ascent, but Redstone was a financial juggernaut who drew powerful interests to his side, and he stood taller after each corporate endgame. Yet, this bellicose cycle sounds somewhat at odds with his stated preference to discuss things rationally and settle agreeably. He is, he declares, Viacom, and Viacom is King of Content—and within this frame of reference, Redstone sits as king and kingmaker. It reads like a courtroom drama having the judge for jury, but a blurring of the enjoyment of battle for the sake of winning with an enjoyment of battle for its own sake seems an occupational hazard in the high-stakes entertainment industry. Nonetheless, Redstone’s gilding wears thinner with each Viacom victory, and his vindicatory attitude calls for interpretation—not just reading along. In his opening pages, he takes issue with a critical Business Week cover story, but by the end his self-congratulatory tone has added substance to the “mad genius” caricature.
Outrageous as he is, for personality and readability, Redstone gets an A.Pub Date: June 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86224-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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