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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© 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
