A hot dog memoir that ultimately isn’t juicy enough.
Riley details his ascent from a poor Southern farm boy to the head of one of the world’s most successful hot dog companies.
In his debut memoir, the author tells the story of his incredibly successful career, detailing the steps that led him to become the president of Hygrade Food Products, a world-renowned meat production company that created Ball Park Franks. Along the way, his marketing skills and business acumen help him tackle all manner of tricky situations, from strikes and union negotiations to a very scary incident involving a customer who claimed to have found a razor blade in a hot dog: “[W]e weren’t quite sure what we were dealing with….Had some lunatic tampered with a package at the supermarket?” He also touches on his family life, his love for his wife, Pat, and his sadness at her death after a long, happy marriage. Through it all, however, he remains modest: “I’m hardly the first or last person from a humble background—without financial resources, connections, or the advantage of a college diploma—to rise to the top of a company, industry, or profession.” Riley has had a remarkable life, including a childhood in a sharecropping family, and his long tenure at Hygrade certainly offers some momentous occasions. His voice is clear and strong, but also humble and self-deprecating. Unfortunately, too much of the memoir reads like rote recitation of past events, with too many long-winded descriptions of business technicalities for lay readers to remain entertained. Although Riley discusses several people who were important to him, they tend to blend together, and readers may have difficulty remembering who’s who. Some of the strongest sections are when Riley contributes analysis; for instance, he muses that, as a child in the South, he “lived in a strictly circumscribed world, the opposite of what today would be known as ‘diverse’….The ethnic mix around me changed abruptly once I arrived in Detroit in the 1960s.” This statement opens up some fascinating questions that remain frustratingly unexplored: How did he feel about the change in his circumstances? What was the city really like? More nuance might have made the story more engaging.
A hot dog memoir that ultimately isn’t juicy enough.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499042504
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 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
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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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