A candid, straightforward account of one man and his rise from rags to riches.
The lifelong journey from shoeshine boy to construction mogul.
Born in Atlanta in 1930, Russell was no stranger to hard work. From the age of 6, he tended his family's chickens; when he turned 8, he had a paper route; by 11, he was mixing mortar for his father's plastering company. "The truth is that I always wanted to work,” he writes. “Everyone I knew and respected worked, and worked hard." From those earliest moments, Russell, who wrote this book with the assistance of veteran business writer Andelman (Why Men Watch Football—A Report from the Couch, 2013, etc.), knew the key to success was to consistently strive to do his best. He broke racial barriers while segregation was still deeply entrenched in the South and established a construction company that built everything from apartment buildings to airports. He used his hard-earned money and astute business sense to help those at the forefront of the civil rights movement by providing much-needed monetary funds and behind-the-scenes support for Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Seeing there was a lack of bankers willing to support blacks, Russell branched out to provide banking and insurance for his community in Atlanta and eventually was invited to join the all-white chamber of commerce. One venture and connection fed into another, with Russell understanding the importance of networking long before it was hip to do so. "I'm often asked how I could have owned a portfolio of almost two thousand rental units, a property management company, and an insurance agency before the age of forty,” he writes. He honestly admits he was judicious with his spending and always reinvested in the company before allowing himself personal luxuries. Family and friends played an important role in Russell's life, as well, and his memories of fond moments are interspersed throughout the story of the rise of his successful businesses.
A candid, straightforward account of one man and his rise from rags to riches.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61374-694-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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