Word: herbert
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REVCO D.S. Back in 1986 it was the largest U.S. drugstore chain. Revco plunged into an LBO that year after Herbert Haft, chairman of the Dart Group of retailing companies, made a bid for the Twinsburg, Ohio-based firm. With advice from Salomon Brothers, Revco chairman Sidney Dworkin led a $1.3 billion LBO financed largely by junk bonds that paid more than 13% interest. The company then expanded its line of merchandise to include video players and ^ electronic appliances in the hope of boosting business. Bewildered customers began shopping elsewhere, and Revco fell short of its sales and earnings targets...
...some bit of ingenuity and/or luck, Sellars discovered two talented young identical twins, Eugene and Herbert Perry, and cast them as Don Giovanni and his servant Leporello. This provides all kinds of ironies on the brotherhood of master and man, but it also obliterates the no less important differences between them. Thus in the famous scene in which the two switch costumes so that the servant can court one of his master's ladies, Sellars' twins make a meaningless exchange of their leather jackets...
...Herbert traces the elements of a story that, at least in Peary's case, approach tragedy. He was a poor boy from Maine, trained as a civil engineer and desperate, Herbert argues, to pile up successes for his widowed mother to admire. "I must have fame," he wrote...
Contestants in the hero game had to produce results to keep their wealthy backers interested, and Herbert makes it clear that Peary feigned a "farthest north" record at about the time Cook, astonishingly, was counterfeiting a first ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley). To what degree Peary admitted to himself that he was a fraud is unknown. So is the extent to which Matthew Henson, his unswerving black assistant, understood the fudging. Herbert writes sympathetically of all these voyagers, whose real accomplishments were extraordinary. They were married to the Arctic, and perhaps the truth of the matter was that if they...
...matter of marriage was not just figurative. Though Peary's adoring public did not know this, and his loyal wife Jo may have put aside suspicions, Peary had an Eskimo family. So did Henson. In one of the book's most touching passages, Herbert reports that in May 1971, Peary's Eskimo grandson Peter Peary reached the North Pole by dogsled with Avatak Henson, grandson of Matthew Henson...