Although the narrative is occasionally plodding, Baum’s history is incendiary, providing fuel for many a political fire.
An anecdotal history tracing the fortunes of the American brewing family known as much for its right-wing politics as for
its suds, written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Baum (Smoke and Mirrors, 1996). The founder of the Coors dynasty was Adolph Coors, who arrived in Colorado in 1873 and built a brewery in the foothills above Denver—thereby founding a town that now, Baum observes, feels like "a fragment of Hamtramck, Michigan, dropped amid spectacular Rocky Mountain wilderness." Adolph and his sons had strong feelings about the proper places of bosses and workers, and they made a name for themselves as sometimes beneficent but more often harsh owners who busted unions and relentlessly combed the ranks of their workers to weed out "thieves, radicals, and homosexuals." The Coors family was often innovative in business, introducing the aluminum beverage can into the American market, but Baum maintains that its elders made some bad calls, missing opportunities to capture a homegrown market in mineral water and refusing to pasteurize their beer to allow its sale outside the immediate region. Constantly mired in labor disputes and lawsuits, boycotted by unions and civil-rights groups, the Coors company nevertheless built a huge national market in the 1970s, helped along by Gerald Ford’s publicly admitted fondness for the company’s beer. Now publicly held, the Coors company has made efforts to present itself as politically mainstream by hiring more minority workers, but the changes have only gone so far. As Baum concludes, "Although bludgeoned into becoming more progressive within the walls of its brewery, the Coors family has chosen to remain committed on the national level to reversing the racial, sexual, environmental, and social revolutions of the twentieth century"—reason enough for millions of consumers to insist on boycotting (or buying) the Coors’s brew.
Although the narrative is occasionally plodding, Baum’s history is incendiary, providing fuel for many a political fire.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-15448-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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