A highly flattering biography of an important figure in American publishing.
A sympathetic life of the publisher of Vanity Fair, Vogue, and other stylish magazines.
Ronald, who has published a number of other biographies (Hitler's Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe's Treasures, 2015, etc.), returns with the thoroughly researched story of Condé Nast (1873-1942), following him from birth to death (both in New York) and charting his rise in the publishing world, his significant financial difficulties during the Depression, his married and love lives (not always the same), and his battles with prostate cancer and, finally, a weak heart. Throughout, Ronald’s tone is deeply admiring as she chronicles Nast’s work ethic, appearance, devotion to his staff members (he “had an anaphylactic reaction to firing people”), and his stellar parties. A first marriage did not work out; nor did his second to a woman some 30 years his junior. The author also tells us—more than once—that Nast attracted “some of the most stunning women in the world,” though he “never used his position or power on women.” Later, suffering the aftereffects of prostate cancer and its dire treatments, he endured permanent erectile dysfunction. Appearing on Nast’s vast stage were some of the most creative characters of the day, including Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Coco Chanel, Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, and Cecil Beaton. (A long list is in the backmatter.) Nast got along with most of them (though some were fired), and the author praises them, as well. The one exception is Clare Brokaw (later Clare Boothe Luce), whom Ronald assails more than once for her self-interest and her insatiable sexual appetites. Readers interested in business history will enjoy the strategies and principles dear to Nast and the accounts of his competition with William Randolph Hearst.
A highly flattering biography of an important figure in American publishing.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18002-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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