An engaging cautionary tale with much to teach about business and many relevant socioeconomic issues.
An eastern entrepreneur goes west with calamitous results.
In 2018, 61-year-old Murphy, a self-described “acolyte of the Atlantic establishment,” moved to Colorado. He assumed that because all his other business startups had been successful that he had the savvy and vision to make a fortune growing legal hemp. His timing was prescient, his plan impeccable, his future fragrant. What could go wrong? Just about everything, it seems. Murphy, the author of The Long Haul, is an insightful and incisive observer, not least regarding the cultural differences between his native, class-conscious New England and the more egalitarian Colorado. Though he felt at home with the West’s enterprising spirit, he knew the reality: “There’s a reason the word ‘dream’ appears upon that mythic American pedestal.” The author had his reservations about the hemp business, had no experience in agriculture, and could obtain little useful data on hemp growing; for the most part, he was flying blind. Planting crops on a rocky alluvial plain in a semiarid environment was not ideal, but the prospect proved irresistible. He chronicles his rise and fall with a wicked sense of humor, especially useful in skewering persistent myths of every kind, whether business, ecological, or historical. However, his withering critique of the rugged individualist frontier malarkey and its damaging effects on our society is no laughing matter. Murphy is a capitalist to the core but no fan of what he calls the plague of “corporatocracy,” whose misdeeds he savages. He also tells the true story behind America’s hopelessly misguided war on drugs. Murphy spent 20 years as a long-haul mover, which acquainted him with America’s “underclass,” and few could rival his assessment of the immigrant community and our treatment of it. He never tires “of listening to the life stories of people inhabiting the bottom of the American Dream,” and his book is all the richer for it.
An engaging cautionary tale with much to teach about business and many relevant socioeconomic issues.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781324006107
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
