A thoroughly professional report on the rise and near fall of Rupert Murdoch as the planet's ranking multimedia baron. In recounting how the Australian-born, English-educated maverick built a transnational empire that encompasses newspapers, book publishers, a Hollywood movie studio, magazines, UK satellite broadcast facilities, and a US TV network, Shawcross (The Shah's Last Ride, Sideshow, etc.) doesn't shrink from discussing whether his subject is a force for good or ill. While giving Murdoch full credit for appreciating what had to be done to capitalize on the information age's commercial potential, the author frequently taxes his subject for taking acquired properties (Fax, London's Tunes, New York's Post, TV Guide, etc.) down market. Nor does Shawcross put much stock in the administrative or operational acumen of the vaultingly ambitious, opportunistic Australian (who became a US citizen so he could legally own American TV stations). Indeed, the author devotes much instructive attention to how fiscal legerdemain (coupled with recession) almost put paid to Murdoch's debt-burdened holding company toward year-end 1990. A Citicorp-led bailout staved off disaster at the 11th hour, however, allowing Murdoch to retain control of a restructured, albeit no less powerful, enterprise. Whether this reversal of fortune was in the public interest, though, is an open question for Shawcross. Noting that Murdoch (whom rivals call "the Dirty Digger") is a uniquely important broker of entertainment and news, Shawcross fears that he may (absent the socioeconomic restraints imposed upon corporate competitors like Bertelsmann, Paramount, and Time Warner) continue to appeal to the more base tastes of reading and/or viewing audiences. Along similar lines, the author takes frequent exception to Murdoch's penchant for adversarial labor relations, as well as to his enthusiasm for American culture and unfettered capitalism. A worldly-wise rundown on a visionary magnate.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1993
ISBN: 0684830159
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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 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
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