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
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
