The compelling story of a Horatio Alger who lived well into his 90s.
An admiring biography of the Vegas wheeler-dealer who made billions but whose personal life became quite tangled.
Veteran Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Rempel (At the Devil's Table: The Man Who Took Down the World's Biggest Crime Syndicate, 2011, etc.), a consultant for the TV show Narcos, returns with a richly detailed account of the life of Kirk Kerkorian (1917-2015). The author begins in 1972 in Las Vegas, ventures back to 1944, when Kerkorian was a daring and fortunate pilot, moves back to his subject’s birth and boyhood, and continues chronologically thereafter. Kerkorian was a fearless gambler—in casinos (at the tables, he once bet $1 million on a single roll of the dice), at the bargaining table in business deals, and in his love life. Throughout, Rempel emphasizes Kerkorian’s my-word-and-handshake-are-golden business ethos, his astonishing generosity, and his fierce desire to avoid the limelight. (Several times, the author contrasts Kerkorian’s style to that of Donald Trump.) All sorts of celebrities—in business, sports, and elsewhere—glide through the text, including tennis star Andre Agassi; Mike Tyson, whose infamous ear-biting episodes occurred at a fight in Kerkorian’s MGM Grand Hotel in Vegas; fellow business magnate Lee Iacocca; Elvis Presley; and Cary Grant, one of Kerkorian’s good friends. We also learn about Kerkorian’s exercise regimen—he loved tennis and stayed fit throughout his life—and the only negative aspects of his character that Rempel deals with are the mogul’s various marriages (three) and love affairs, one of which dissolved into nastiness, lawsuits, and paternity questions. The vast fortune Kerkorian assembled was truly astonishing; his many Vegas, airline, and automotive deals put him in the ranks of America’s richest people. Although the author and his subject never met, the text is chockablock with dialogue and intimate detail assembled by deep research and many interviews.
The compelling story of a Horatio Alger who lived well into his 90s.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-245677-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
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
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