Call them Halle's Golden Rules. They ought to be canned and fed to every schoolchild.
Financial journalist and consultant Rosenbaum (Your Name Here Guide to Life, 2009, etc.) tells the cheering story of Bruce Halle, the force behind the Discount Tire Company.
Halle's tale is inspiring because he built a business empire out of treating both his workforce and his customers with good will. Starting in 1960, he sold tires from his little shop in Ann Arbor, Mich., with a welcoming smile on his face, fast and courteous service and clean restrooms. He worked like a dog, yet he never showed anything but respect and appreciation to his customers and employees. Rosenbaum presents the story in pleasingly unadorned fashion; you can almost sense Halle standing over his shoulder, feeding him the material. One moment the action will be centered on an aspect of Halle's business strategy, which in turn might spark some personal reminiscence. Though a considerable amount of the book chronicles Halle's life's progress, what sings from the pages are the heart-gladdening pillars of his business vision. It goes without saying that the customer gets class treatment—for, as a friend of Halle's noted, "Nobody gets up in the morning and says, 'What a beautiful day. I think I'll go buy four tires.' They get up and say, 'I have to buy new tires.' It's like going to the dentist”—but the workers also feel like they are getting class treatment from the workplace. Many of the workers who gravitate to Discount are "lost boys” without a sense of direction. The company provides a genial atmosphere, a good wage serious potential. Rosenbaum makes it all sound like business-for-dummies, with a bright helping of humor and head-slapping obviousness, repeating his subject’s mantra: "Be honest. Work hard. Have fun. Be grateful. Pay forward.”
Call them Halle's Golden Rules. They ought to be canned and fed to every schoolchild.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60832-257-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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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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