Smit’s flat, textbook-like prose hardly matches her subject’s vibrancy, but that’s a relatively minor flaw in a fast-moving...
In her impressive debut, business journalist Smit tears the laces off two beloved conglomerates.
The majority of casual jocks may wear Nike and Converse, but for the hipster athlete (or non-athlete) willing to pay a few extra bucks for sneakers with flash as well as functionality, Adidas and Puma are it. The respective history of these two European shoe corporations is shadowy at best, and certainly intriguing enough to merit a full-length study. Smit brings the reader into the innovative minds and often black hearts of old-school sneaker magnates—and Nazi party members—Rudolf (Rudi) and Adolf (Adi) Dassler. The brothers began churning out shoes in the early 1920s, then split the company some two decades later, Rudi starting Puma and Adi launching Adidas. In addition to relating their up-and-down relationship, Smit also examines the effect of athlete endorsements on both society and business, discussing the involvement of everybody from 1936 Olympics sprinter Jesse Owens to 1972 swimming medalist Mark Spitz to soccer player David Beckham in 2007. She also cleverly touches on the shoes’ place in the entertainment industry; for example, there’s a small but sharp passage about the classic Run-D.M.C. rap jam “My Adidas.”
Smit’s flat, textbook-like prose hardly matches her subject’s vibrancy, but that’s a relatively minor flaw in a fast-moving tale about the machinations behind contemporary pop culture’s most enduring footwear.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-124657-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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