Solid storytelling brought to bear on a dusty corner of financial history.
In which a proto-yuppie out of a Tarkington novel gets his comeuppance—sort of.
James Hazen Hyde, writes journalist Beard (Good Daughters, 1999, etc.), had it all: charm, good looks, and lots and lots of money. By his late 20s, bottom-feeding in a Wall Street run by the likes of J.P. Morgan, Alfred Vanderbilt, and E.H. Harriman, he had become a senior officer in the Equitable Life Assurance Society and a director of no fewer than 46 companies, all of which netted him an income so vast that he was able, in the early 1900s, to pay an annual upkeep on a mansion in the neighborhood of $100,000, complete with a huge collection of carriages and other toys. Just as perp-walked executives of today insist that they came by their fortunes honestly and poor accounting was to blame for company woes, Hyde protested his own straight-upness when, in the wake of a lavish party he threw in 1905, his comfortable world dissolved in a vast scandal; when the books were finally balanced, it was revealed that millions had gone missing, including $7 million alone in the mysterious category “for other disbursements.” Hyde high-tailed it to Europe, marrying well and producing a son who became a leading figure in the Cold War intelligence community. In his later years, clad in a cape and spats, the statute of limitations presumably up, he could be seen wandering the streets of New York; he made for good gossip, “and if he was an odd duck,” Beard writes, “he was also a sophisticated, entertaining, fascinating dinner partner.” Was he the Ken Lay of his time? The evidence is spotty, but Beard depcits well the Gilded Age and its spectacular excesses—and in an age of corporate scandal, it’s comforting somehow to know that legions of the crooked have gone before us.
Solid storytelling brought to bear on a dusty corner of financial history.Pub Date: July 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019939-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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