A good read for anyone interested in confidence men and the history of Wall Street.
The tale of an early-20th-century con man who swindled millions through horse racing, mining claims, and penny stocks.
Thornton (Not by a Long Shot: A Season at a Hard Luck Horse Track, 2007) tells the story of the most notorious grifter you probably never heard of. Born Jacob Simon Herzig to Austrian immigrants in Manhattan’s Jewish ghetto, he was more interested in betting on horse races than a legitimate life path. After Herzig stole from his family’s fur business for the second time, he was incarcerated in Elmira Reformatory. While imprisoned, he endured a range of tortuous treatments and came out a new person with a new name. Taking a surname from a fellow prisoner and older newspaperman-turned-forger, Herzig became George Graham Rice. Along with adopting the former newspaperman’s last name, he also took up the habit of displaying a certain journalistic flair. Specifically, Rice would use newsletters as a means to market his dubious promises and products. After a venture in the business of predicting winners at the horse track, Rice moved west and began to sell shares in mining claims of questionable worth. When that scheme hit a dead end, he returned to New York and became involved in the emerging business of selling penny stocks. On Wall Street, his reputation was exemplified by the various names the public gave him, including “jackal.” While jumping between coasts, Rice was also in and out of various prisons. Throughout his career, he straddled the line between legitimate and illegitimate business and befriended pivotal figures in both worlds—e.g., Teddy Roosevelt’s son and the infamous racketeer Arnold Rothstein. As such, his story is an interesting tour through the early years of Wall Street and the often blurry lines between legal and illegal business practices.
A good read for anyone interested in confidence men and the history of Wall Street.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05437-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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