Review by Booklist Review
A maker and spender of money on a megalomaniacal scale, publishing potentate William Randolph Hearst provoked no neutral opinions during his extravagant life: biographies of him were either excoriations or exaltations. After a 40-year hiatus in the genre, Nasaw here revives Hearstiana with a balanced, estimable chronicle of the man and the headlines, opinions, mistresses, profits, debts, newspapers, parties, yachts, and real estate that passed through his head or through his hands over 88 years. Whatever drove Hearst, money was not his principal motivation, as he was the only child of one of the richest men in 1880s California. But his father was absent and neglectful and never answered William's letters, often pathetic bids for paternal attention. Nasaw, blessedly, eschews psychobiography, shrewdly implying that compensatory attention-seeking was one of Hearst's lifelong motivations. Attention he certainly got, beginning with the toy his father gave him in 1887 following his expulsion from Harvard: the San Francisco Examiner. What became the yellow press began there: a purient puree of sensationalized sex and crime, combined with an editorial posture of outrage at the powers-that-be. These were Hearst's radical years, which Nasaw's prose makes as rambunctious as they must have seemed to the purchaser of his penny papers, which clamored for war with Spain or thumped the drum for Hearst's presidential ambitions. Nasaw also reconstructs Hearst's private life, covering his relationship with actress/consort Marion Davies, his fantasy estate at San Simeon, and his virtual bankruptcy in the late 1930s. As an autocratic, capitalist opinion-maker beholden to no one (except to his mother, who controlled his finances until age 56), Hearst's image persists in popular imagination--at least for viewers of Citizen Kane. Nasaw's thorough account reveals a more interesting and less monstrous Hearst. --Gilbert Taylor
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
It has been 40 years since the last major Hearst biographyÄthus this new volume has inherent value in portraying anew the great forerunner of Rupert Murdoch and other modern-day media moguls. This long-winded tome, however, often bogs down in trivial details of Hearst's tangled personal and professional life. Nasaw (Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements) is the first to have had access to the formerly closed Hearst archives, but he doesn't really offer any surprises. On the big questions, the author only confirms what we already knew: that it was a lack of academic diligence that lay behind Hearst's failure at Harvard; that, like countless other well-heeled young men of his generation, he kept a mistress before marriage; that he was nave in his dealings with Hitler. Neither is it a revelation that Hearst's financial collapse in the late 1930s was the result of spendthrift habits combined with the dour economic climate of the times. But the Hearst whom Nasaw portrays in such extraordinary (and excessive) detail is still the fascinating figure we've known for years: the self-absorbed genius equally addicted to power and possessions, the press baron interested not just in reporting news but in making and manipulating it. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC alternate selection. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The outsized life of William Randolph Hearst is a challenge to any biographer. The son of a miner who made a fortune in Western gold fields, he transformed American journalism as a publisher. He was a force in Hollywood's first golden age, and Marion Davies, his longtime mistress, was an early star. In politics, he served in Congress and sought the presidency, an office Franklin Roosevelt attained with the help of Hearst, who then became an arch-critic while corresponding with world leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler. As a collector, he filled warehouses with art objects he could not fit into the castles he built and bought. It may be inevitable that no biography could do full justice to each aspect of such a life, but CUNY historian Nasaw (Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements) has done an admirable job. Enjoying the cooperation of family members and access to new primary sources, Nasaw has written a richer biography than the previous standard, W.A. Swanberg's Citizen Hearst (LJ 10/15/93), and a comparable book to Ben Proctor's two-volume work-in-progress, of which William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years (LJ 4/1/98) is Volume 1. Highly recommended for general collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/00.]DRobert F. Nardini, Chichester, NH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A comprehensive biography of the man who built the nation's first great media empire and saw its potential for shaping political discourse, influencing elections, and setting the national agenda. Nasaw (Going Out, 1993, etc.) was allowed access to previously unavailable personal and business papers by Hearst family members and the Hearst Corporation in the course of his research. He has compiled an exhaustive portrait of the larger-than-life Hearst from his nomadic childhood--he was the son of a self-made millionaire miner and a doting, peripatetic mother--to his final illness at the home of his mistress Marion Davies. A social success but an academic failure at Harvard, Hearst was 24 when he was given control of the San Francisco Examiner by his father in 1887. Nasaw recounts how Hearst built his newspaper empire and how he used his position as editor and publisher to influence American politics in the early decades of the 20th century. Occupying center stage are Hearst's political ambitions: his battles against trusts, political corruption, internationalism, and Communism; his relations with the Democratic Party and with presidents and would-be presidents (as well as with Churchill, Mussolini, and Hitler). But Nasaw also focuses on the energetic Hearst as an art collector, a film producer, a family man, a lover of women, and a big spender. With his empire built on borrowed money--at first from his mother (his father had left her everything) and later from banks--Hearst, the great builder and accumulator, eventually found himself in severe financial difficulties and was forced into virtual bankruptcy. Nasaw's story is a big one, full of American and world history, characters famous and infamous, entertaining trivia that may or may not be revealing, and (unfortunately) a good measure of tedious detail. A full-length portrait that effectively corrects the Citizen Kane caricature. (50 b&w photos, not seen) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
