A memoir full of entrepreneurial spirit that may be inspirational to readers trying to make it in business on their own.
A fast-acting entrepreneur with a positive attitude, good gut instincts and endless energy relates how he made money on junked autos in thisdebut memoir.
In 1972, Vietnam veteran Johnson started his business with nothing but a 5-acre auto dismantling yard east of Sacramento. But he relentlessly expanded and innovated, eventually founding Copart, an international online auto auction, and taking it public. This is no mean achievement for a man from very humble beginnings. His first teacher was his father, who knew his way around the auto-wrecking trade and could spot good deals—even if he had to learn about them by listening to his wife read aloud from the local newspaper’s classified section. In this memoir, the son, now in retirement, tells a classic story of second-generation success, although he leaves the actual writing to his former Copart communications director, debut author and former journalist Pugh. Her professionally rendered account of Johnson’s steady, upward climb makes for engaging reading; it even includes chapter subheadings with motivational messages to good effect. However, Johnson’s unalloyed first-person voice is lost, and Pugh isn’t given to critical appraisal. Johnson is shown as trustworthy, decisive and God-fearing, putting family first but working himself to the bone, and all in all, he emerges as a man with something extra. But the narrative goes only as far as Johnson wants to take it, and the focus softens during rougher patches or when exploring the interstices of his little-understood industry. For example, the book laments the devastation and flooding in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as a prelude to disclosing that its aftermath was a bonanza for auto salvagers. However, it doesn’t detail how these swamped vehicles worked their way through salvaging, leaving readers unenlightened about the afterlife of water-damaged auto parts.
A memoir full of entrepreneurial spirit that may be inspirational to readers trying to make it in business on their own.Pub Date: March 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490816593
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
