Optimism about America from a man mulling his next expression of civic responsibility.
The former CEO of Starbucks wants to give everyone a chance to be their best selves.
Schultz (Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, 2011, etc.) reflects on his personal and professional journey “to try to answer a vital question of our time: What can we do to effect meaningful change and create the just, fair, and secure future we all desire?” He recounts successes, challenges, and failures as he pursued his goal of creating a profitable business that balances “seemingly competing priorities of humanity and prosperity.” Schultz envisioned Starbucks as more than a coffee shop: a place of respite and community where people would feel welcomed, a “third place,” he calls it, not home or work but rather an escape from both. “Haunted by the anxiety” of his family’s financial insecurity, Schultz wanted to give his employees respect, fair pay, and benefits such as health insurance, stock options, and, eventually, tuition reimbursement. Starbucks, he hoped, would become known “as a great place to work” as well as a place “that fostered human connection over great coffee.” The author comes across as a sensitive—although sometimes naïve and wide-eyed—observer of injustice and a “common-sense” problem-solver open to innovative ideas. In 2014, after the deaths of Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin, for example, he began to ask himself “what the tragic deaths, court rulings, and uprisings revealed about the plight of black people in America today.” As a white, wealthy male, he wondered, “Where had I been?” His response was to mount an initiative called Race Together—a message featured on Starbuck cups and discussed in open forums—which, he was surprised to discover, generated “biting headlines” and satirical jokes. Nevertheless, he believes his decision to focus on race embodied the company’s values “of trying to uphold human dignity by fostering civil conversation about complex topics.” More successful initiatives include college mentoring, job creation for veterans and refugees, and philanthropic giving from the author’s family foundation.
Optimism about America from a man mulling his next expression of civic responsibility.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50944-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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