Heiress Marjorie Post was many things during her long life, but ``empress'' seems an overstatement. Post was one of the wealthiest women in the United States, but her life as described by journalist Rubin is hardly riveting. The most interesting character in this biography is her father, C.W. Post, an ambitious and inventive man who gave us the coffee substitute Postum and Grape Nuts cereal, the products on which the Post fortune was based. After her father committed suicide, Marjorie inherited Postum Cereals but, because she was a woman, felt she could not even sit on her own company's board of directors. She did insist that Postum Cereals buy a small business run by a man named Clarence Birdseye; in 1929, Postum incorporated Birdseye Frosted Foods and became the General Foods Corporation. Despite that business success, Post always considered her proper role to be wife and mother. She had four husbands: Edward Close, scion of an old-line Connecticut family and father of two of her daughters; E.F. Hutton, who built the famous brokerage firm and fathered her third daughter, actress Dina Merrill; US ambassador to Russia Joseph Davies; and business executive Herbert May. Marjorie shone as a hostess and homemaker, with establishments from the Adirondacks to the renowned Mar-a- Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. Her four-masted yacht, Sea Cloud, caused one of the few scandals in her life: It carried a cargo of luxury foods to Moscow to stock embassy larders when the strained Russian economy was short on staples. The yacht was later loaned to the US Navy for the duration of WW II, a public gesture atypical of Post's usually quiet generosity. When she died in 1973 aged 86, she had since grown deaf but was still flirting with idea of a fifth husband. Post's life was eventful, but Rubin's conventional narrative fails to convince one that it is a life worth writing about. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Town & Country)
Pub Date: Jan. 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41347-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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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