A revealingly revisionist biography of Armand Hammer who, before his death at 92 in 1990, had made a considerable name for himself as an industrialist, patron of the arts, philanthropist, and unofficial envoy to Communist seats of government. Drawing on a wealth of previously classified material from KGB files and other sources, Epstein (Deception, 1989, etc.) documents the substantive disparities between reality and his subject's carefully cultivated public image. While sojourning in the USSR during the early 1920s, the Bronx-born Hammer met Lenin and became a Comintern agent responsible for laundering the money used to pay undercover operatives in North America. Returning to the US during the Depression, the would-be magnate did not strike it rich until 1956, when he used his third wife's money to latch on to Occidental Petroleum, which, with a little luck and a lot of bribes, he turned into a transnational energy colossus. Taking advantage of auld acquaintance with long-dead Red luminaries, he also became a vocal advocate of unrestricted East/West trade during the height of the Cold War. A gifted and tireless self-promoter, Hammer was a gleeful forger as well; with the connivance of his Kremlin accomplices, he flooded the global art market with fake FabergÇ objets. While shamelessly lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize in his twilight years, moreover, he picked up a conviction for violations of US election law. In addition he faced constant accuations of wrongdoing by the FBI, IRS, SEC, State Department, and other federal agencies. Nor, by Epstein's tellingly detailed account, was the high-profile Hammer a much better bargain for members of his extended family, friends, and business associates (whose tenure seldom outlasted their usefulness) or Occidental's stockholders. A dirt-dishing, painstakingly corroborated life story that sets the record straight on a master con man who fooled most of the people most of the time. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44802-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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