A heartfelt and engaging retrospective on a long and successful career.
In Comley’s debut business book, the 95-year-old author tells the story of his decades-long career as the head of Embree Elevator, now in the hands of its second generation.
The book presents elements of the author’s professional history, offering lessons for future entrepreneurs and young members of the workforce and providing insight into how he was able to successfully combine work and family over many years. Comley explains how he came to make elevator maintenance his life’s work, offering plenty of fascinating details that will surprise readers unfamiliar with the wide variety of elevators in existence. He also engagingly discusses the values at the core of his professional and personal life. The book explores key business themes, such as risk management, sustainable growth, proper hiring efforts, and effective managerial policies. Comley is forthright and charmingly self-deprecating at times, making the text an enjoyable read. (“Yes, even at my age, I know who Wiz Khalifa is.”) The specific circumstances of his career provide fine fodder for reflection, as in his acknowledgment that, as the owner of a service company who came up through the trade, he learned to interact effectively with both his largely blue-collar employees and the college-educated executives of corporate clients. The book acts as a welcome antidote to many contemporary win-at-all-costs tales of running businesses; Comley explains why employee safety is one of his company’s main values, how he chose to turn down expansion opportunities that might have put the family-run business at risk, and clarifies the importance of work-life boundaries. He accomplishes all this and offers advice to a new generation without talking down to readers, bringing a welcome tone to a story of personal and professional success.
A heartfelt and engaging retrospective on a long and successful career.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9781963549386
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Broad Book Studio
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
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
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