A smart business book detailing some vicissitudes of retailing, wrapped in a vivid biography of an engaging tycoon.
Dublin-based journalist O’Clery presents an archetypal American success story, a rags-to-riches account with a twist.
Few people had heard of Charles Francis Feeney in 1988 when Forbes outed him as immensely wealthy. He was, the magazine reported, richer than Mr. Murdoch or The Donald, richer than David Rockefeller. But O’Clery reveals that Chuck Feeney was personally worth merely a few million—Feeney had managed, through his French wife, to transfer, in strict secrecy, his considerable wealth to offshore charitable foundations. Born during the Depression, Feeney was an Irish-American kid from New Jersey, educated at Cornell on the GI Bill. A natural, bright entrepreneur, he devised ways of selling liquor and gray-market cars duty-free to service men abroad. Business was good, and soon he was selling brandy and other extravagant treats to Japanese tourists in Hawaii; the money continued to pour in as he expanded his market to Hong Kong and beyond. But despite his growing wealth, Feeney reverted to his social conscience and to active philanthropy. This dominant retailer of brand-name goods kept his own name concealed, and the code of omerta applied to all who dealt with his secret foundations. With the line between the donor and the charities often porous, subterfuges shrouded major unsolicited gifts to Feeney’s alma mater, to Sinn Féin and to many other beneficiaries around the world (between 1998 and 2006, his Atlantic Philanthropies “provided $220 million for a series of building and scholarship projects and health initiatives in Vietnam.”) A decade ago, the cloak and checkbook operation was finally exposed. Feeney, who flies economy class, wears a $15-dollar watch and uses plastic bags for briefcases, was ready to provide a public example for other wealthy people. There was a split with his former partners when the declining business was sold at the top of the market, but Feeney’s ex-associates, now immensely rich, do not seem to have adopted his principles.
A smart business book detailing some vicissitudes of retailing, wrapped in a vivid biography of an engaging tycoon.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58648-391-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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