The founder and CEO of the renegade International Discount Telecommunications firm (IDT) has passed his 40th birthday. He reckons it’s time to tell his life story. A proud graduate of the redoubtable Bronx High School of Science and a really proud drop- out from Harvard (which he found “intellectually sterile, arrogant, closeminded and unfriendly”), Jonas is the exuberant embodiment of freewheeling entrepreneurial chutzpah. He started making money at 14 with a homemade hot dog stand. The junior achiever graduated to further profits via mail order, hawking such gimcrackery as horoscopes, pet plants, and ordinary seedlings marketed as nascent bonsai trees. Sure, some promotions may sound somewhat marginal to readers who don’t share the Jonas spirit. But accept his assurances that he’s no scam artist. He’s just a straightforward self-made businessman, honest to a fault “pathologically honest,” as he puts it. The scrapes that often threaten to thwart his honest efforts, especially his pains in completing IDT’s initial public offering, have been the work of Wall Street insiders, government bureaucrats, AT&T, or the fickle media (which occasionally could be helpful; after a while, the press “adulated” the firm). Between espousals of libertarian doctrine, Jonas does turns as an avuncular metaphysician, waxing profound about society, business, and life in general. Within the genial multimillionaire hustler is a closet rabbi, humbly reflecting on the human condition. Indeed, Jonas personifies real humanity, crediting his success to loyal colleagues and providence, as well as to his own creativity. His devotion to his wife and eight kids is patent. Most folks will find it hard to keep up with the Jonases. Not likely to become required reading at Harvard Business School, but nevertheless more engaging than it has any right to be.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-87902-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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