This deep-dive celebration of an enterprising executive and company delivers engrossing nuggets of history.
In this biography/memoir, a son shares the life story of his father, focusing on the man’s role as the pioneering leader of the global conglomerate Grace, Kennedy & Co. Ltd., which started in Jamaica in 1922.
In a prologue set in 1976, entitled “Troubled Times,” Luis Fred Kennedy, the author’s father, discusses the just declared state of emergency in Jamaica and how “the company’s future is uncertain.” The account cycles back to trace the Kennedy family’s roots in Jamaica. The author’s great-grandfather William Kennedy was “of mixed heritage, African and Irish, a progeny who became a member of the first-generation, post-Emancipation of free ‘brown’ men born in Jamaica.” In 1922, when W.R. Grace divested its Jamaican subsidiary, William’s son, Fred, founded Grace, Kennedy, a trading company, with a member of the Grace family. Upon Fred’s unexpected death in 1930, his firstborn son, Luis Fred Kennedy, then 21 years old, stepped up to assume management roles in the company. The bulk of the volume is taken up with Luis’ 50-plus years at the company, guiding its growth and dealing with the rise of trade unions; Jamaica’s transition from a colony to an independent nation; and the country’s political turmoil, including the period highlighted in the prologue. Author Kennedy praises his father for his “genuine desire to build wealth for the common good.” This richly detailed book, which is illustrated with family and corporate photographs and other archival materials, is a tribute that may be of most interest to the Kennedy family and business historians. The author lauds Grace, Kennedy, now “a multinational corporation with shareholder equity valued at over J$65 billion,” for having “withstood the test of time—one hundred years of integrity and prosperity.” But he also provides insightful commentary into the various socio-economic issues that arose during the era covered and makes a compelling case for the “social conscience” capitalism that his father (who instituted various worker benefit programs) practiced.
This deep-dive celebration of an enterprising executive and company delivers engrossing nuggets of history.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2022
ISBN: 9781039142916
Page Count: 496
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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
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
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