Attention Wal-Mart shoppers—and anyone interested in the history of retailing in America. Here’s the tale of the late Sam Walton, once the richest man in the country, and of the marketing juggernaut he fashioned. With “big box” stores at every crossroads, Wal-Mart, together with affiliated outlets like Sam’s Clubs, is the largest retailer in the world; Mr. Sam’s enterprise is second only to Uncle Sam’s in number of employees. (“Associates— is what the Wal-Mart sales force is called.) As reporter Ortega, who followed the firm for the Wall Street Journal, demonstrates, it was all done with a heavy dose of down-home bunkum and a monomaniacal devotion to business by cunning country boy Walton. Single-minded Mr. Sam, driving an old truck, used to pay folksy visits to his expanding domain. As it grew to become a ravenous retailing force and he became a billionaire, he remained the same canny tightwad, charming his “associates” even as he underpaid them. “Satisfaction guaranteed” and “low prices” were the watchwords, and if that eliminated the small-town merchant, so be it. But Mr. Sam died, and times have become a little more difficult. Many communities have successfully resisted heavy-handed Wal-Mart incursions. Concurrent with a “Buy American” campaign, the firm was shown to be buying lots of jeans and tchotchkes made in Chinese gulags and shirts and bras made by Third World children. (The Kathy Lee Gifford child-labor flap is a case study in mismanagement.) With the company based in Arkansas, one might wonder about a Clinton connection; and sure enough, Hillary appears as a feisty board member. All in all, Ortega provides a vivid analysis of Wal-Mart and competitors like Sears, Price Clubs, and, notably, K-Mart, with many anecdotes that are emblematic of a new way of business. Here is well-researched, high-end business reportage, readable and informative. Put it in the category of “Store Wars.” (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8129-6377-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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