An interesting tale of how curiosity and entrepreneurship merged to transform TV and education.
A memoir from Hendricks, the founder and chairman of Discovery Communications, the world's leading educational communications and TV company, which boasts more than 400 million subscribers living in 215 countries.
The author tells how he built the basis for his present dreams to provide educational TV services to the 400 million households worldwide that lack electricity by working through the world's village schools. He describes how he had been drawn to the educational power of TV as a child growing up in Alabama in the 1950s. Moving into public service as one of the first lobbyists at the federal level for university programs and then the founder of a newsletter company servicing academic science programs, Hendricks recalls how he prepared for the opportunity that would present itself in September 1982, when he founded “Cable Educational Network,” the predecessor to the Discovery Channel. The author had accumulated insight into the world of documentary films, cable TV and the broadcasting system, as well as the untapped potential of 25 percent of viewers whose interest in scientific and other factual content was going unaddressed, which Hendricks calls “the magic number that would one day create a multibillion-dollar industry.” The author also shares his own view of the characteristics that shape a successful entrepreneur. For Hendricks, the key has always been curiosity, which he views as “the fuel of human progress,” something that can be taught “to anyone, at any age, anywhere in the world.” Recruiting the people and raising the finances to build the capacity called on still other qualities, which the author’s narrative helps bring out. Hendricks also explores the economics of cable broadcasting and where the technology of global educational TV is headed.
An interesting tale of how curiosity and entrepreneurship merged to transform TV and education.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-212855-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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