The compelling story of a Horatio Alger who lived well into his 90s.
An admiring biography of the Vegas wheeler-dealer who made billions but whose personal life became quite tangled.
Veteran Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Rempel (At the Devil's Table: The Man Who Took Down the World's Biggest Crime Syndicate, 2011, etc.), a consultant for the TV show Narcos, returns with a richly detailed account of the life of Kirk Kerkorian (1917-2015). The author begins in 1972 in Las Vegas, ventures back to 1944, when Kerkorian was a daring and fortunate pilot, moves back to his subject’s birth and boyhood, and continues chronologically thereafter. Kerkorian was a fearless gambler—in casinos (at the tables, he once bet $1 million on a single roll of the dice), at the bargaining table in business deals, and in his love life. Throughout, Rempel emphasizes Kerkorian’s my-word-and-handshake-are-golden business ethos, his astonishing generosity, and his fierce desire to avoid the limelight. (Several times, the author contrasts Kerkorian’s style to that of Donald Trump.) All sorts of celebrities—in business, sports, and elsewhere—glide through the text, including tennis star Andre Agassi; Mike Tyson, whose infamous ear-biting episodes occurred at a fight in Kerkorian’s MGM Grand Hotel in Vegas; fellow business magnate Lee Iacocca; Elvis Presley; and Cary Grant, one of Kerkorian’s good friends. We also learn about Kerkorian’s exercise regimen—he loved tennis and stayed fit throughout his life—and the only negative aspects of his character that Rempel deals with are the mogul’s various marriages (three) and love affairs, one of which dissolved into nastiness, lawsuits, and paternity questions. The vast fortune Kerkorian assembled was truly astonishing; his many Vegas, airline, and automotive deals put him in the ranks of America’s richest people. Although the author and his subject never met, the text is chockablock with dialogue and intimate detail assembled by deep research and many interviews.
The compelling story of a Horatio Alger who lived well into his 90s.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-245677-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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