Jackson’s well-crafted American success story is the kind of aspirational, warts-and-all tale that truly inspires.
What makes this appealing rags-to-riches memoir so unusual is that the author is not a celebrity or star athlete. He’s an attorney for Microsoft.
However, that doesn’t make Jackson’s journey—from the public housing projects of Manhattan to launching his own entertainment law firm to his current role as associate general counsel for Microsoft—any less impressive. The author’s storytelling is measured and remarkably evenhanded, whether he is relating how he convinced LL Cool J’s grandmother that he should represent the rapper or explaining how he put his career ahead of his family, hurting his marriage. Though he occasionally skimps on personal details, Jackson is passionate and engaging in his discussions of racial relations and diversity. “Diversity happens mostly at the recruitment and hiring stage, and it is crucial; but it is, in many ways, merely a prerequisite for the intensely hard work of inclusion,” he writes about feeling so lonely as a Black man at Microsoft that he nearly quit. “I’m sure that, if pressed, most of my colleagues would have strongly denied any racist tendencies whatsoever and defaulted to Hey, I got my life, and Bruce has his life.” Jackson’s story clearly shows why his life is so different from the lives of his White counterparts. Professors questioned his abilities because of his race and background. Police arrested him because of a glitch with his car insurance, and when he told his Microsoft co-workers about the experience, they didn’t believe him. “My world is different than your world once we leave this place,” he tells them. “That’s what some of you don’t understand; hopefully you understand it now.” By sharing his life story in this way, the author will open the eyes of some people while letting others feel seen for the first time.
Jackson’s well-crafted American success story is the kind of aspirational, warts-and-all tale that truly inspires.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781982191153
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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 rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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