A flawed biography that reveals more about capitalist societies’ willful ignorance and ethical conundrums than the secret...
A walking-on-eggshells attempt to shed light on arguably the most influential oil trader of our time.
Marc Rich rose to prominence, and billionaire status, in the 1970s by inventing the spot market for oil and by working harder and more aggressively than other commodities traders. His corporation famously traded with apartheid South Africa, Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini, Cuba, Nigeria under the dictator Sani Abacha, China and Russia. In 1983, then–New York attorney Rudy Giuliani brought more than 50 charges against Rich in a highly publicized indictment that ended with Rich in self-exile, the ruination (or exposure, depending on your perspective) of Rich’s name, his tenure on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, his eventual pardon by President Clinton and Rich’s near-complete retreat from the public eye. Rich is a polarizing figure, and while Die Weltwoche business editor Ammann admirably attempts to capture his nuances, the author’s analyses and observations are conducted with undue caution. Circumspect reportage—the author frequently writes of Rich responding “uneasily” or “warily”—gives the impression that Ammann doesn’t wish to jeopardize his position by asking tough questions. This restraint brings unnecessary diffidence to the book, with one surprising exception: a brief, frank interview with one of Rich’s commodities traders. Questioned by Ammann about the ethics of trading with oppressive regimes, the anonymous subject points out that the bauxite used to produce the aluminum in Ammann’s soda can probably came from an oppressive dictatorship, and the oil heating the interview room probably came from Saudi Arabia. “Do the people who criticize our work want to know any of this?” the trader asks. The author assumes that the answer, for most American consumers, is no. To him, Rich and his fellow commodities traders operated, and still operate, “between a sense of reality and self-deception…the name for this gray area is capitalism.”
A flawed biography that reveals more about capitalist societies’ willful ignorance and ethical conundrums than the secret lives of its inscrutable subject.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-57074-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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
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
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