Ultimately boring, but good reference material. (8-page photo insert, not seen)
An excruciatingly factual account of the “profit taking” schemes that made Thomas Mellon Evans and his corporate-raiding contemporaries fabulously wealthy in the postwar era.
Although he presents it as the personal story of Thomas Evans, New York Times reporter Henriques (Fidelity's World, 1995) has actually produced something more on the order of a textbook covering the men and ideas behind some of the nation’s first and most notorious proxy fights. The players include Lou Wolfson (a shareholders’-rights crusader who defended his tactics before Congress), Robert Young (the sometime poet who was the first to use public relations and advertising to take his message to shareholders), and Charlie Green (an investor in 20th Century Fox who, snubbed on a visit to the studio lot, waged and lost a major proxy battle with that firm). Evans, however, appears to have used proxy fights simply to accomplish his aim of obsessively building his portfolio and personal wealth. His methods included low-balling old women who were trying to protect their families’ fortunes, and he was particularly keen to target firms that were “family run by a third-generation Yale man who spends his afternoons drinking martinis at the club.” Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell what exactly Henriques thinks of all this, and her reverently dispassionate tone hardly fits into the winner-take-all world she is describing. Nor is it clear why she found Evans interesting. Of one Evans proxy fight, she declares: “It is intriguing that no one wondered aloud or in print why Tom Evans, who was immensely rich, bothered to wage such a bitter expensive battle simply to take control of a paper company.” A reader might well ask Henriques the same question.
Ultimately boring, but good reference material. (8-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: May 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83399-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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