A witty, eye-opening collection.
A New York City–based advertising executive candidly reflects on the tastes, habits, and lifestyles of his superrich Upper East Side acquaintances and their friends.
New York has always been a city known for socioeconomic extremes. However, as Kirshenbaum (Madboy: Beyond Mad Men: Tales from the Mad, Mad World of Advertising, 2011, etc.) suggests in this series of revealing essays, it has now become a place where the influence of the richest .01 percent “has spawned an era of excess, entitlement, grandiosity, and outright glitz not seen since the Roaring Twenties.” The author begins by examining the dynamics within overprivileged families, where fathers serve as little more than “invisible ATM[s],” parents often find themselves “smoking, popping and snorting” every drug imaginable, and nannies and chauffeurs double as surrogate parents for their employers’ delinquent children. Divorce is practically nonexistent, but for economic rather than emotional reasons. As one of Kirshenbaum’s informants observes, the only people who gain from marriage breakups are lawyers, who are nothing more than “undertakers for the living.” Dating among those who do divorce—and in particular, women—is an exercise in settling for one of three things: “sex, money or a warm body.” Friendship is often equally as devoid of feeling as romantic relationships. Kirshenbaum shows how wealthy people often surround themselves with individuals who “provide companionship and offer courtlike flattery” in return for financial gifts and favors. Where personal appearance is concerned, physical perfection isn’t merely a quest: it’s a way of life. The humor in this book is as understated as it is successful and derives largely from the way Kirshenbaum reports what he sees and hears in the world of the superrich and refrains from judging. Instead, he lets his informants—e.g., the divorced, wealthy businessman who shaves his body hair for his lovers and likens it to giving “consumers what they want”—reveal their foibles and foolishness themselves.
A witty, eye-opening collection.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0732-0
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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