In Pushing the Limits (2001), Margo traced Lowy's story up to his seventieth birthday when, as she points out in her Preface, he was widely expected to retire. This second book exists because, not for the first time, Lowy defied expectations and embarked on what would be nearly two decades of intense activity as a commercial, sporting, and cultural leader and innovator. Pushing the Limits is fourteen years old, so Margo's decision to begin this second life with a summary of the first is a welcome one, the more so because Lowy's early years were arguably more extraordinary than those that followed in his prime. Born into the world of the Great Depression, the young Lowy grew up securely in the care of his loving parents, Slovakian Ilona and Hungarian Hugo, and a large and equally affectionate extended family. But 1930s Europe was descending into chaos, and Kristallnacht in November 1938 signalled the seriousness of the anti-Semitic wave sweeping through Germany, Austria, and the soon to be divided Czechoslovakia:

Jews could no longer keep their heads down, mind their own affairs and get on with life. In a small town [Filakovo] they were easily identified. Frank and his friends were harassed on the way to and from school. 'You knew you were a Jew and that people didn't like you. It was humiliating,' Frank recalled. But though he was afraid, he would never show it.

A move to the relative anonymity of Budapest seemed to have worked well until the Germans invaded Hungary. When the family decided to leave Budapest, Hugo was caught in a round-up of Jews at the station and, after a brief exchange of letters, he fell silent. It would be fifty years before Frank knew what had happened to his father, and this deeply buried but endlessly reiterated question haunted and hurt him until at last it was fortuitously explained and healed.

So much happens in A Second Life, and Lowy is such a dynamo of ideas, activities, reactions, solutions, risks, and ventures that it is possible to misapprehend and perhaps diminish the importance of its core. Margo makes this explicit at the start of the critically important section, called 'Touching the Past':

In the first half of his life Frank had no interest in returning to Slovakia. Members of the small Jewish community of Filakovo had all but perished in Auschwitz and the town had been 'ethnically cleansed'. As Frank's adult life was packed with activity, he found it relatively easy to block out his early European years and think back only as far as Israel, which had given him a fresh start. But this comfortable internal arrangement was not sustainable.

'This second book exists because, not for the first time, Lowy defied expectations and embarked on what would be nearly two decades of intense activity'

Nor is it sustainable in the biography at the heart of which lies the tragic loss of a much-loved father and the quest to unravel the circumstances of his death and give him peace and commemoration at last. 'The disappearance of his father had remained an open wound. While Frank learned to live with it, he never forgot that it was there.' A series of stunning coincidences – the sort of random interlocking of events and people that you couldn't risk in a fiction and that only 'real life' can sometimes amazingly and incredibly serve up – calls Lowy back to Auschwitz Birkenau and allows him to bring his decades-long quest to a moving conclusion. 'In the presence of family and his friends, Frank had finally touched the past. "It is the closing of a certain stage for me," he said. "I was thirteen years old when I lost my father. Today I am eighty."'

Frank Lowy at the 2013 March of the Living, Auschwitz Birkenau (photograph by Dominique Rui-Lin Teoh via Wikimedia Commons)

Lowy's symbolic burial of his father at Auschwitz Birkenau occurs just short of the halfway mark of this long book. Its solemnity and sorrow evoke from Margo her best writing, and it sets up a dramatic transition to new narrative territory: 'By his eightieth birthday Frank Lowy was the wealthiest man in Australia.' This new territory is characteristically crowded, distinguished by headlong pace and bewildering changes of fortune, though mostly the fortune is good, with impeccable judgement, slices of luck, tough bargaining, and smart timing weaving a fascinating thread through endlessly repeated meetings, forests of acronyms, manoeuvrings, and 'strategizing' (Jill Margo's word and one she could profitably redact along with 'in terms of' and 'in relation to'). Among the high points are the establishment of the Lowy Institute for International Policy and the Lowy Medical Research Institute. But a spectacular defeat comes in the form of the bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, described in relentless detail from its beginnings to its devastating conclusion.

'A series of stunning coincidences ... calls Lowy back to Auschwitz Birkenau'

In the end, we know and yet do not know Frank Lowy. We come close to this loving, genial tycoon and yet are kept at bay by implications of the 'steel' behind the smile and the generosity, a quality of toughness that must be in there somewhere to have generated and sustained such success in such unforgiving arenas.

'Let us now praise famous men' indeed, but it is often intrinsic to their fame that they are on the move, hard to pin down. Jill Margo has been both nimble and diligent in her pursuit, but even she is overwhelmed at times by the blur of successive meetings, and strictly biographical concerns give way to a record of achievements, commercial coups, and unrelenting aspiration. Rupert Murdoch's dust jacket puff, 'Frank's story is the story of Australia', is not only wrong – Lowy's story is one of brilliant, determined individualism in a society that once welcomed migrants – it scarcely survives its own corrosive irony: the man who abandoned his country and citizenship for commercial advantage praising the man who endured privation and pain to come here by choice and thrive here.