A gossipy, character-driven saga suggesting that the spoiled rich are their own worst enemies.
A prolific biographer of the rich and infamous, Oppenheimer (Madoff with the Money, 2009, etc.) digs into five generations of the Johnson family, “the most dysfunctional family in the Fortune 500.”
Founded in 1887 by three Johnson brothers, Johnson & Johnson became synonymous with products such as Band-Aids and baby powder. The author occasionally reveals corporate strategies and secrets but mostly focuses on the members of the extended Johnson family, detailing their mind-boggling personal wealth. Hundreds of names come and go throughout the narrative, with Oppenheimer concentrating on 15 blood relatives, their spouses and business partners. The book is largely a fast-paced chronicle of births, courtings, marriages, divorces, estrangements, bitter lawsuits, drug and alcohol abuses, crimes, memorable deaths and other unpleasantness. After the first generation, members of the Johnson family found it difficult to decipher whether outsiders cared about them for their personalities or only for their wealth. That kind of doubt can cause havoc with emotional stability, as Oppenheimer demonstrates with frequent salacious details of the lives of his protagonists. As is the case with his other unauthorized biographies, the author usually reveals little about whether his information derives from primary or secondary sources. The writing is clear but often painful to read due to the use of clichés and trite metaphors. One Johnson family member emerges as the chief subject: Robert Wood Johnson IV, a great-grandson of a company founder. Oppenheimer uses the nickname “Woody” to identify the protagonist, frequently coming back to his fundraising for Republican presidential candidates and his ownership of the New York Jets.
A gossipy, character-driven saga suggesting that the spoiled rich are their own worst enemies.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-66211-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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