An evenhanded study by an author determined to cover all the bases.
A nuts-and-bolts biography of the great American visionary portrays a character of enormous contrasts.
Curcio (Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius, 2000, etc.) certainly does not whitewash Ford’s troubling character flaws, manifested in periods of parochialism, anti-Semitism and megalomania, but the author does a fine job delineating the staggering influence Ford wrought on the modern industrial landscape. His system of mass production revolutionized life for the average worker, creating a new social class that could also enjoy the goods that it made; on the other hand, Ford’s urbanization helped destroy the agrarian life that he so nostalgically valued. Curcio covers several important currents that shaped the leader Ford would become: his resolve early on, with the death of his beloved, supportive mother, to keep his own counsel, which both worked toward his enormous success, as he followed his egalitarian business instincts, and blinded him to the wounds inflicted by his anti-Semitic editorials in the early 1920s; his ability to attract the best and the brightest in the industry, such as the Dodge brothers, accountant James Couzens and “father of the assembly line” Clarence Avery, among many others; and his lack of a formal education, which Curcio speculates had something to do with his inability to check his attraction to some wacky and hurtful ideas strangely at odds with his overarching views about happy, peaceful, harmonious workers. Yet Ford could also admit when he was licked, as evidenced by his apology in 1927 to Jewish lawyer Aaron Sapiro, a retraction of his attacks on Jews and his concession to the unionizing of Ford’s River Rouge plant in 1941.
An evenhanded study by an author determined to cover all the bases.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-531692-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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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