A highly flattering biography of an important figure in American publishing.
A sympathetic life of the publisher of Vanity Fair, Vogue, and other stylish magazines.
Ronald, who has published a number of other biographies (Hitler's Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe's Treasures, 2015, etc.), returns with the thoroughly researched story of Condé Nast (1873-1942), following him from birth to death (both in New York) and charting his rise in the publishing world, his significant financial difficulties during the Depression, his married and love lives (not always the same), and his battles with prostate cancer and, finally, a weak heart. Throughout, Ronald’s tone is deeply admiring as she chronicles Nast’s work ethic, appearance, devotion to his staff members (he “had an anaphylactic reaction to firing people”), and his stellar parties. A first marriage did not work out; nor did his second to a woman some 30 years his junior. The author also tells us—more than once—that Nast attracted “some of the most stunning women in the world,” though he “never used his position or power on women.” Later, suffering the aftereffects of prostate cancer and its dire treatments, he endured permanent erectile dysfunction. Appearing on Nast’s vast stage were some of the most creative characters of the day, including Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Coco Chanel, Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, and Cecil Beaton. (A long list is in the backmatter.) Nast got along with most of them (though some were fired), and the author praises them, as well. The one exception is Clare Brokaw (later Clare Boothe Luce), whom Ronald assails more than once for her self-interest and her insatiable sexual appetites. Readers interested in business history will enjoy the strategies and principles dear to Nast and the accounts of his competition with William Randolph Hearst.
A highly flattering biography of an important figure in American publishing.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18002-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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