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THE MAN WHO CHANGED HOW BOYS AND TOYS WERE MADE

Artfully nostalgic account of a phenomenon that survived two world wars but not Elvis.

Journalist Watson offers up the life and times of Alfred C. Gilbert (1884–1961) with an aura of homage one might expect from anyone who ever, in childhood, confronted the subject’s chief contribution to American culture: the Erector Set.

The biographer’s job is made all the more rewarding by Gilbert’s multifaceted dynamism: with what would be a toy bulldog’s body by today’s standards of male physique, he rode a vaulting pole to world records and an Olympic Gold Medal. Leaving Yale’s medical school with an M.D., he promptly abandoned medicine for magic, founding Mysto Manufacturing in New Haven, Connecticut, to hawk a series of parlor tricks that he himself had excelled at as a kid. Even then, A.C., as he became universally known by associates and freckle-faced customers alike, had his magnum opus in mind: by stamping a simple corrugation on a toy-scale “girder” that resembled those used in heavy construction for bridges and skyscrapers all over America, Gilbert produced a stiffer, superior component. Yet the rest may well not have been history, the author points out, if Gilbert hadn’t “made himself part of the package.” Such deceptively simple-minded slogans as “Hey Boys, Make Lots of Toys,” delivered under Gilbert’s likeness both in Erector ads and on packaging, Watson observes, were the product of a genius who essentially practiced boyhood for his entire adult life in order to fully plumb the market. Chemistry sets, microscopes, and even—after WWII—a nuclear science kit that included a small sample of radioactive material followed, but none challenged the ever-widening line (at one point including a kit that weighed over 100 pounds and cost $150) of Erector Sets. Faced with competitive “youth culture” marketing that screamed instant gratification in the mid-’50s, Gilbert finally grew up and left the company.

Artfully nostalgic account of a phenomenon that survived two world wars but not Elvis.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-670-03134-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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