The story of a successful CEO who left his position to pursue a long-deferred dream of becoming a college football coach.
In 1983, Joe Moglia was the defensive coordinator for Dartmouth’s football team. He was also a husband and a father of four, and he was faced with a decision: continue slowly climbing the college coaching ladder, not making enough money to support his family, or turn his back on that dream and pursue something more lucrative. A great deal of hard work and chutzpah later, he had secured a comfortable position with Merrill, which he left to take over foundering TD Ameritrade. Moglia turned the company around, making it one of the most stable and respected brokerages in the country. After eight years, and at age 60, he left to pursue coaching. Breaking into college-level coaching at this age proved to be a different challenge, which left him back where he'd started, clawing his way through the ranks of coaching. Burke (Sowbelly: The Obsessive Quest for the World-Record Largemouth Bass, 2006, etc.) does Moglia's story justice, showing how his strengths in finance helped lift his coaching of a small UFL franchise into financial stability. A winning record for the team, almost essential for Moglia to achieve his college coaching dream, was another matter. The team struggled, and as the focus shifted from a winning record to saving face, Moglia's perspective on his dream also shifted. Burke's approach is unique among financial, business and sports books, as it's not crucial to understand much about football or money to enjoy the book. A winning story for fans of Friday Night Lights and believers in the American dream.
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4555-1404-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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