A fast-paced, gossipy rundown on the House of Gallo, whose octogenarian patriarchs helped make wine a mass-market commodity in the US while concealing a past replete with personal and business scandal. Although Ernest and Julio remain the most familiar Gallos, they have a younger brother, Joseph, Jr., who has no stake in the family firm. When the two elders, who built the immensely profitable E & J Gallo Winery, sued Joseph during the mid-1980's to prevent him from putting his own name on the cheese he made for sale, they opened a Pandora's box. Drawing on the vast troves of documentary material released by the protracted litigation, and on his access to many Gallo principals, relatives, and ex-employees, Hawkes (Feminism on Trial, 1986) offers a revelatory, generation- spanning chronicle. In addition to piercing the corporate veil, the author discloses that Joseph, Sr., an Italian immigrant who became a successful grape grower in northern California, murdered his wife and then killed himself in 1933. His estate gave Ernest and Julio the means to get into the wine business in a big way—with an unacknowledged assist from a bootlegging uncle. Hawkes leaves little doubt that the ruthlessly autocratic Ernest euchred a trusting Joseph, Jr., out of a potentially sizable legacy. Moreover, she points out, for all its oenological pretensions, Gallo's most profitable products are so-called street wines (Thunderbird, Night Train Express, Gypsy Rose). Covered as well are: the strong-arm tactics used to gain distribution for Gallo wares; frequent run-ins with federal authorities; the peace of mind attained by Joseph, Jr., despite primal betrayals; and a host of familial fancies long accepted as facts. While Hawkes gives Joseph, Jr., the benefit of almost every doubt, she provides a slick reckoning on the Gallos, a would-be dynasty that, by her account, may be nearing the end of the line. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-64986-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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
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