A straightforward account that will appeal to CEOs, business bloggers, business students and professional women.
Mohn chronicles her story of being a fifth-generation member of the family-owned international media conglomerate Bertelsmann, a corporation with more than 100,000 employees in 50 countries.
The author began working for the Bertelsmann Book Club in the 1950s, and she became the protégé of Reinhold Mohn, head of the company and 20 years her senior. Though he was married, the couple had three children together and ultimately married in 1982. Mohn soon began taking on larger projects for the company, such as overseeing the construction of its headquarters. During the ’70s, the author became deeply involved with the Bertelsmann Foundation, which was designed to “work with specialists and with public and private institutions to develop projects.” Mohn has been instrumental in projects in the medical and health care fields and music and the arts, and she stresses the necessity of combining intuition with reason as the formula for success in business and life. The author also discusses the social responsibility of corporations, the role of women in the professional world, the differences between men and women in the workplace and the importance of combining family and work. She touches on globalization, migration, global warming and the debt crisis in Europe. For years, she writes, European leaders refused to confront the problems facing the European Union and purposely withheld information from citizens. “For me,” she writes, “the social unrest that is taking place in Greece and France is the precursor to serious social conflict.”
A straightforward account that will appeal to CEOs, business bloggers, business students and professional women.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3601-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Crown Business
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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