A straightforward, evenhanded and often riveting assessment.
Mother Jones senior editor Schulman delivers provocative reportage on the Koch alpha-family legacy.
Patriarch Fred, a dedicated Kansan industrialist, rancher and entrepreneur, exercised a task-driven, “voracious work ethic.” He was a founding member of the anti-communist John Birch Society and a pugilist, which meant that resolving disputes among his sons often involved gloved fisticuffs. Frederick, the oldest and most artistic, was an outlier gravitating away from the family business. He was soon followed by rebellious second son Charles and “pathologically competitive” fraternal twins David and Bill. Well before his father’s death in 1967, Charles had already assumed authority over the successful family oil-refining business, which Fred left equal percentages of to three of his four sons (Frederick was disinherited due to numerous theft allegations) with the caveat that the bequeathal could be “either a blessing or a curse.” Charles and David exerted a diligent “top-down control” with libertarian leanings in building the business into the country’s second-largest privately owned multinational corporation. However, dissension in the ranks pitted brother against brother, as Schulman depicts in the second half. While the brothers’ drive and dedication further fortified their father’s empire, the Koch family portrait becomes less flattering as their ruthless, vicious infighting and litigiousness became commonplace. The author generously depicts the nasty retaliatory efforts by Charles in response to flashy “Wild Bill’s” numerous efforts to gain his own foothold in the business and against hermetic, reclusive collector Frederick when he refused to relinquish company shares. Now billionaires, Charles’ and David’s strategic, manipulative political contributions, Schulman notes, have also garnered negative notoriety for personifying the nation’s wealth inequality—most notably, in the 2012 presidential election, where they emerged as “cartoonish robber barons” bankrolling the tea party movement. Free from conjecture or personal criticism, Schulman’s astute account is buttressed by concrete research, legal documents, and verbatim interviews with family members and friends.
A straightforward, evenhanded and often riveting assessment.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-1873-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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