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
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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