Outrageous as he is, for personality and readability, Redstone gets an A.
A robust autobiography by the self-styled owner and CEO of media conglomerate Viacom (published, incidentally, by the company’s book subsidiary).
The Redstone legend, played up from many angles in the business and celebrity media, is treated here to a richly suggestive and selective retelling, true to the biz-bio mode. The oldest son of demanding, supportive parents, Redstone grew up an overachiever and has kept accelerating. He was a high-profile Washington lawyer by his early 30s, but he traded in his safe profession for a business opportunity, joining his dad’s drive-in theater start-up. With steely temperament and confidence, Redstone recounts how he successfully built up a regional industry leader through equal applications of effort and chutzpah: He mercilessly pursued the Hollywood studios, like David against Goliath, while making West Coast alliances that leveraged Viacom’s steep growth trajectory. It was a brutal ascent, but Redstone was a financial juggernaut who drew powerful interests to his side, and he stood taller after each corporate endgame. Yet, this bellicose cycle sounds somewhat at odds with his stated preference to discuss things rationally and settle agreeably. He is, he declares, Viacom, and Viacom is King of Content—and within this frame of reference, Redstone sits as king and kingmaker. It reads like a courtroom drama having the judge for jury, but a blurring of the enjoyment of battle for the sake of winning with an enjoyment of battle for its own sake seems an occupational hazard in the high-stakes entertainment industry. Nonetheless, Redstone’s gilding wears thinner with each Viacom victory, and his vindicatory attitude calls for interpretation—not just reading along. In his opening pages, he takes issue with a critical Business Week cover story, but by the end his self-congratulatory tone has added substance to the “mad genius” caricature.
Outrageous as he is, for personality and readability, Redstone gets an A.Pub Date: June 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86224-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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