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Idols of the King
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10161 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1986 |
2,295 Words |
| Author
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Andrei Navrozov
Andrei Navrozov is editor of The Yale Literary Magazine and a
contributing editor of Harper's. |
ONASSIS: ARISTOTLE AND CHRISTINA
L.J. Davis
St. Martin's Press, 1986
$16.95
Biographies of great tycoons are difficult to write and nearly impossible to read. Caught in a maze of dry and ostensibly unimpeachable yet in reality often distorted and tendentious business information, writers can rarely find the literary fulcrum they need to turn the didactic world of Horatio Alger into a truth as entertaining as F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction. A highly readable specimen of this genre should command our attention, and L.J. Davis' new biography of Aristotle Onassis does just that.
Onassis: Aristotle and Christina is the story of a business empire built by one man whose autocratic management style and misplaced dynastic ideal would be the undoing of both his enterprise and his family. The setting for this drama is literally the world's stage. The spectacle is provides is fascinating.
"These ceremonies and shows," wrote an observer, "may be condemned by philosophy and ridiculed by comedy…. Yet the common sense of mankind has never adopted the rigid decrees of the former, nor ever sincerely laughed with the latter." The writer here is not L.J. Davis but John Adams, describing in his Autobiography his visit to Versailles in 1778. His words epitomize the Onassis story. Perhaps this is so because the very language we use to describe someone's great success - replete with unconscious metaphors such as "empire," "dynastic," "spectacle" - seems to have absorbed the salient concepts of absolutism. The incongruous
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