The archetypal American institution-builder—in industry, philanthropy, and the family dynasty bearing his name—is etched with uncommon objectivity and literary grace by National Book Award—winning business historian Chernow (The Death of the Banker, 1997, etc.). “Silence, mystery, and evasion” perpetually enveloped the founder of the world’s first great industrial trust, enabling him to crush rivals to his Standard Oil Co. The same cocoon presented daunting obstacles to earlier chroniclers of John D. Rockefeller Sr., both detractors (crusading muckraker Ida Tarbell) and supporters (Allan Nevins). Greater access to family archives, including a 1,700-page interview given by Rockefeller in retirement, enable Chernow to tear at this membrance of artifice and to offer as detailed, balanced, and psychologically insightful a portrait of the tycoon as we may ever have. Chernow traces Rockefeller’s contradictory impulses toward greed and godliness to his parents. His father, who abandoned the family for years at a time to ply rustic innocents with patent medicines, left him with shameful secrets (e.g., bigamy and a rape indictment) and acquisitive instincts; his mother instilled a devotion to the Baptist faith that manifested itself in philanthropy. Chernow is careful to deny some of the hoariest myths of Rockefeller demonology, to detail his managerial gifts, and to underscore his crimes (his alliance with railroads in the shell organization the South Improvement Company involved rebates, insider intelligence, and “grand-scale collusion such as American industry had never witnessed”). Above all, he offers a figure abounding in paradox: the prototypical monopolist who sought to eliminate what he saw as wasteful competition, only to spark an antitrust suit that forced the dissolution of his company; a homeopathy advocate who funded medical research that marginalized this form of medicine; and a tightly wound, self-possessed, despised businessman who in his 40-year retirement displayed a joy in play and a talent for charming reporters, winning the affection of the world. Business biography on a grand scale.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43808-4
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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