Bianco, Anthony 1953-yay!
PERSONAL: Born May 17, 1953, in Oceanside, CA; son of Anthony, Jr. (an orthopedic surgeon) and Joann (Reavill) Bianco. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, B.A., 1976.
ADDRESSES: Home—17 1st St., Brooklyn, NY 11231-5001. Agent—Esther Newberg, International Creative Management, 40 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019. E-mail—tony_bianco@businessweek.com.
CAREER: Minneapolis Tribune, Minneapolis, MN, reporter, 1977; Willamette Week, Portland, OR, business writer, 1978–80; Business Week, New York, NY, San Francisco correspondent, 1980–82, staff editor, 1982, department editor in markets and investments, 1983–84, associate editor, 1984–85, senior writer, 1985–92, 1996–2005, national correspondent, beginning 2005.
MEMBER: Society of Professional Journalists, New York Financial Writers Association.
AWARDS, HONORS: Media award for economic understanding, Amos Tuck School, Dartmouth College, 1979; award for feature writing, Oregon Newspaper Publishers, 1979; Distinguished Editorial Achievement Award, McGraw Hill, 1986; award for excellence in financial writing, New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants, 1987; Canadian National Book Award, 1997, for The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune and the Empire of Olympia & York.
WRITINGS:
Rainmaker: The Saga of Jeff Beck, Wall Street's Mad Dog, Random House (New York, NY), 1991.
The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune and the Empire of Olympia & York, Times Books (New York, NY), 1997.
Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block, William Morrow (New York, NY), 2004.
The Bully of Bentonville: How the High Cost of WalMart's Everyday Low Prices Is Hurting America, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2006.
SIDELIGHTS: Anthony Bianco is a respected, award-winning journalist who specializes in the business world. In 1991, Bianco published a biography of Jeff Beck, a notorious investment banker who earned enormous wealth in the 1980s by manipulating the stock market in legal, quasi-legal, and illegal ways. In Rainmaker: The Saga of Jeff Beck, Wall Street's Mad Dog, Bianco profiles Beck as a representative figure of the times, one whose wealth, success, and even marriage were based on a fabric of lies and exaggerations. Bianco and Beck were once friends, and Bianco "seems to have followed Beck around for years, listening and admiring and writing," according to Times Literary Supplement contributor Susan Lee. Bianco notes that his original concept of the book was radically altered when the Wall Street Journal published an exposé of Beck's lies about his wealth, his experiences in Vietnam, and other matters; critic Lee and others questioned the author's objectivity, nevertheless. Indeed, "Rainmaker reads less like an effort to uncover a fraud than one to defend a friend and justify the author's own toil," observed Kurt Eichenwald in the New York Times Book Review. Steve Brzezinski, writing in the Antioch Review, took another view, however, praising Bianco's ability to capture the spirit of a man who "shrewdly packaged himself into one of the most successful investment bankers of the 1980s." For Brzezinski, Bianco "effectively uses the triumph and shame of one man's life as a mirror of the turbulence and unreality of the times themselves."
Bianco's next book, The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune, and the Empire of Olympia & York, similarly profiles the rise and fall of an enormous fortune amassed, at least in part, during the real estate boom of the 1980s. The Reichmanns and their family business, Olympia & York, a Canadian-based real estate conglomerate that built some of the most ambitious new construction New York, London, and Toronto had ever seen, amassed a fortune estimated at ten billion dollars while maintaining strict adherence to the strenuous tenets of Orthodox Judaism. For four years Bianco researched the family and its history, tracing the Reichmanns back to a village in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then to Vienna in the 1930s and later, in flight from the Nazis, to Tangier, Morocco, and finally to Canada in the postwar era. Although some critics considered this section of the book overly long and excessively detailed, others, such as Wall Street Journal contributor Richard Siklos, regarded this as the most important contribution of The Reichmanns: "Mr. Bianco's best work may be his recreation of the family's escapades before moving to Canada in the 1950s—a crucial and sometimes controversial aspect of the Olympia & York saga that has not been fully examined before."
Bianco's narrative in the majority of The Reichmanns focuses on the delicate balance that was the family's attempts to serve both God and Mammon, gambling outrageously in the business world while maintaining a humble and rabbinical demeanor. This "contrarian thread runs consistently through the Reichmann epic," noted Tribune Books reviewer Gavin Scott, who added: "It is meticulously traced and gracefully unwound by Bianco." One of the most important aspects of Orthodox Jewish life is charitable works, and Bianco recounts family matriarch Renee Reichmann's efforts on behalf of Jews in concentration camps; more recently, in their Canadian incarnation, the Reichmann family supported nearly 1,000 yeshiva schools for Orthodox Jews around the world. At the head of the family business was diminutive Paul Reichmann, whose pride in running Olympia & York was fueled by his belief that God had ordained his success in the business world, and whose dedication to Orthodox Judaism confirmed the insularity that eventually marred his judgment, Bianco observed. "The Reichmanns, a nicely balanced study, tells you everything you want to know, and then some, about the family's convoluted real estate deals," noted Mordecai Richler in the New York Times Book Review, "but Paul Reichmann, a man charged with contradictions, remains an enigma."
Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block relates the history of New York City's colorful entertainment strip in the heart of Times Square. Writing, as always, from his business perspective, Bianco describes the street from its rise as the home of legitimate theater (and later vaudeville and burlesque) through its demise during the Great Depression, to its rebirth in the middle of the twentieth century as a locus for trendy off-Broadway and nonprofit theater followed by a decline in the 1970s as a decrepit home for derelicts and sleazy movie theaters, and finally through an attempted makeover by government agencies and corporate developers hoping to revive the street one last time in the 1990s. The location of the street in close proximity to other Times Square attractions makes it, according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor, an element of the city's "gathering place for civic events, a work of public art with its swirl of lights from the electronic signs and billboards." Though some reviewers pointed to a potentially intimidating focus on business and financial details in this account, Bianco is, after all, a business writer. Despite the business perspective, a Publishers Weekly contributor called Ghosts of 42nd Street a "moving and dramatic story" that offers readers "the perfect house seat to a glorious past and a promising future."
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
Antioch Review, fall, 1991, Steve Brzezinski, review of Rainmaker: The Saga of Jeff Beck, Wall Street's Mad Dog, pp. 613-614.
Booklist, April 15, 1991, review of Rainmaker, p. 1605; March 1, 1997, David Rouse, review of The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune, and the Empire of Olympia & York, p. 1107.
Books, November, 1991, review of Rainmaker, p. 20.
Books in Canada, April, 1997, review of The Reichmanns, p. 26.
Business Week, April 29, 1991, review of Rainmaker, p. 15.
Choice, June, 1997, review of The Reichmanns, p. 1727.
Christian Science Monitor, March 5, 1997, Leonard Bushkoff, review of The Reichmanns, p. 14.
Economist, February 15, 1997, review of The Reichmanns, p. S13.
Financial Post, February 8, 1997, Susan Gittens, review of The Reichmanns, p. 26.
Financial Times of Canada, May 27, 1991, Tycho Manson, review of Rainmaker, p. 33.
Guardian Weekly, December 29, 1991, review of Rainmaker, p. 21.
Institutional Investor, October, 1997, Riva Atlas, review of The Reichmanns, p. 264.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1991, p. 222; January 1, 1997, review of The Reichmanns, p. 30; March 1, 2004, review of Ghosts of 42nd Street: A History of America's Most Infamous Block, p. 207.
Library Journal, April 15, 1991, Joseph Barth, review of Rainmaker, p. 102; April 15, 2004, Elaine Machleder, review of Ghosts of 42nd Street, p. 98.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 9, 1997, review of The Reichmanns, p. 9.
Maclean's, March 10, 1997, Deirdre McMurdy, review of The Reichmanns, p. 60.
Management Review, November, 1991, review of Rainmaker, p. 48.
Management Today, December, 1991, Robert Dawson, review of Rainmaker, p. 89.
New York Times Book Review, April 7, 1991, Kurt Eichenwald, review of Rainmaker, p. 13; February 9, 1997, Mordechai Richler, review of The Reichmanns, p. 6; June 1, 1997, review of The Reichmanns, p. 40.
Publishers Weekly, March 1, 1991, review of Rainmaker, p. 65; January 13, 1997, review of The Reichmanns, p. 64; March 15, 2004, review of Ghosts of 42nd Street, p. 66.
Quill and Quire, March, 1997, review of The Reichmanns, p. 72.
Report on Business, February, 1997, review of The Reichmanns, pp. 27-28.
Times Literary Supplement, February 28, 1992, Susan Lee, review of Rainmaker, p. 6.
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), February 23, 1997, Gavin Scott, review of The Reichmanns, p. 6.
Wall Street Journal, March 29, 1991, review of Rainmaker, p. A9; January 28, 1997, Richard Siklos, review of The Reichmanns, p. A14.
