A bemused, entertaining portrait of a gold-toned incarnation of the American dream, plus some believable financials for...
New York Times business reporter O'Brien gets down and dirty—in the most good-natured way—to craft a myth-busting biography of the real-estate developer.
The author has been following Donald Trump’s story for the past 15 years, watching him rise, fall and rise again on a self-generated tide of publicity and endless hyperbolic statements. While Trump’s business trajectory isn’t in dispute, O’Brien takes issue with the financial specifics. He punctures decades’ worth of bluster and offers his own take on Trump’s career and the “kitten’s skein of holdings Donald had woven together” by the time The Apprentice anointed him the nation’s most successful developer. Highlights O’Brien explores include Trump’s early battles with Mayor Ed Koch, his business dealings with known Mafia associates and the bailout by his much-less-famous siblings that kept him from going bankrupt. The Donald’s character is almost too colorful; the business deals based on braggadocio, the creative reporting on personal wealth and the trophy wives eventually blend together in a glittering haze. O’Brien keeps coming back to the numbers, however. The book’s essence can be discerned in his analysis of the Forbes 400; for each year that the magazine reported Trump’s personal wealth, the author has done his own reporting. For example, in 1982, Forbes said Donald had an undefined share of the Trump family’s $200 million, “at a time when all [he] owned personally was a half interest in the Grand Hyatt and a share of the yet to be completed Trump Tower.” O’Brien also mentions that New Jersey regulators assessed Donald as being “short on cash and in debt up to his eyeballs.” It’s no shock that Trump is a self-promoter, but it is surprising that he appears to have cooperated with the author, despite having declared O’Brien a “whack job” to the press.
A bemused, entertaining portrait of a gold-toned incarnation of the American dream, plus some believable financials for anyone who wants to know the real fiscal story.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-57854-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 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.
