An engaging story about wealth, entitlement, property rights, change, loss, and pain.
A swift account of the history of Malibu, “a rugged ranch in the middle of nowhere” that became “a global symbol of fame and fortune.”
Reuters senior reporter Randall (Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, 2012) is interested in briskness and conciseness; this is no dense scholarly history. He begins with a quick overview of the entire text, then proceeds with the story of Frederick Rindge (1857-1905), an ambitious Harvard student who, throughout his life, had to battle the lingering effects of rheumatic fever but shared with Theodore Roosevelt the exercise ethos and love of the outdoors that enabled him to live much longer than he otherwise might have. Rindge, as Randall shows us, had a gift for seeing financial opportunities and seizing them—though it didn’t hurt that he began with an inheritance worth some $140 million in today’s currency. He met and very quickly married Rhoda May Knight (who always went by “May”), and off they went to Los Angeles, where he quickly became one of the major movers in that community’s transition to a megalopolis. He bought a huge ranch, once a major Spanish land grant, in the area now called Malibu (an abbreviation of the ranch’s original Spanish name), developed it, and strived mightily—as did his widow, for decades—to keep it both private and pristine. Obviously, they lost. They battled homesteaders, trespassers, and, eventually, the local and national governments, the final stroke being the construction of the Pacific Coast Highway. The Depression wiped out May’s fortune. The author communicates a keen sympathy for the Rindges, praising Frederick for his philanthropy back in his Massachusetts hometown and May for her virtual monomania about the property. As “progress” arrives in the area, the author wants us to feel sorrow for the folks with multiple mansions and vast fortunes.
An engaging story about wealth, entitlement, property rights, change, loss, and pain.Pub Date: March 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24099-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
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
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