An earnest entrepreneur tells, more or less, how he became a billionaire and, except for governmental and media misunderstandings, how wonderful it’s been. Van Andel is co-founder, with pal Rich DeVos, of Amway, distributors of household products, services, and more to the proletariat. Now a plutocrat in his eighth decade, he recalls Rich and Jay’s Excellent Adventure fondly, attributing their phenomenal success to self-reliance and divine beneficence. (His federal tax return now runs some 1,200 pages, an undeniable accomplishment.) It all began when, after some false starts, the lads found and adopted a nostrum called Nutrilite, sold door to door. That led directly to the establishment of the now- mighty Amway, with a claimed distributorship of some three million motivated entrepreneurs worldwide. Taxes are anathema to our hero, yet he seemed shocked to discover that some “had started Amway businesses not as a legitimate moneymaking enterprise, but as a tax shelter.” And it’s not a pyramid scheme as the feds once claimed. Pyramid scams soon collapse under their own weight. Amway has lasted. It really has merchandise to sell. Other differences with various authorities have long since been settled. The judgment, it appears, is innocent by reason of integrity. Now, as the founders age, Amway is being carefully placed in the hands of the next sanctimonious generation. Meanwhile, Van Andel worked for strictly conservative causes and has funded an eponymous museum and a medical research institute (though he’s no fan of current medicine; Nutrilite is good enough for him, thank you). The text is echt Horatio Alger, liberally seasoned with sincere Sunday school Calvinism, as authored by the Sage of Ada, Mich. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-88730-997-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
A superb work that paints the resilient athlete as a fierce competitor and an unforgettable sportsman.
Heartfelt biography of a Texas football star whose life was cut short by cancer.
Inspired by interviews with coaches, teammates and friends and a 1971 autobiography, award-winning sportswriter Dent (Twelve Mighty Orphans: The Inspiring True Story of the Mighty Mites Who Ruled Texas Football, 2007, etc.) tracks Freddie Joe Steinmark’s early years and burgeoning career with the Texas Longhorns. From his childhood in 1950s Denver, Colo., Steinmark’s interest in sports flourished, carefully groomed and profoundly encouraged by his father, a self-made athlete turned cop who’d sacrificed a professional baseball career to raise his son. “A small child with fragile bones” yet dubbed “a born winner” by early mentors, Steinmark’s diminutive stature proved a surprisingly suitable match for his steely, fearless determination on the field. Dent budgets his narrative wisely, proffering equal parts sports achievement and personal accomplishment in tracing his subject’s incremental ascent to greatness as he earned the admiration of fellow teammates like star quarterback Roger Behler. As the Longhorns’ “golden boy” key safety, the “155-pound peach-fuzz kid” exhibited drive and tireless perseverance on the gridiron, making him a respected letterman under Coach Darrell Royal. However, soon after a game-saving field performance, Steinmark suffered a crushing blow when he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of bone cancer that would eventually claim his life at 22. Dent also includes the story of Steinmark’s shyly romantic courtship of high-school sweetheart Linda Wheeler, an intensive love that endured throughout their tenure together at the University of Texas. The author also bolsters the biography with a fond foreword from current Texas head coach Mack Brown, who, to this day, continues to memorialize Steinmark’s legacy by bringing his photograph along to the team’s away-games.
A superb work that paints the resilient athlete as a fierce competitor and an unforgettable sportsman.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65285-2
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
Snowden’s book likely won’t change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.
The infamous National Security Agency contractor–turned–leaker and Russian exile presents his side of the story.
Snowden opens with an argument he carries throughout the narrative: that revealing secrets of the U.S. intelligence community was an act of civic service. “I used to work for the government,” he writes, “but now I work for the public.” He adds that making that distinction “got me into a bit of trouble at the office.” That’s an understatement. A second theme, equally ubiquitous, is that the U.S. government is a willing agent of “surveillance capitalism, and the end of the Internet as I knew it.” The creative web fell, replaced by behemoths like Facebook and Google, which keep track of users’ comings and goings, eventually knowing more than we do about ourselves and using that data as a commodity to buy and sell. Corporations lust for the commercial possibilities of targeted advertising and influence-peddling. As for governments, that data is something that on-the-ground spies could never hope to amass. Snowden insists that he did not release NSA and CIA secrets willy-nilly when he leaked his trove of pilfered information (“the number of documents that I disclosed directly to the public is zero”); instead, it went to journalists who he trusted would act as filters, revealing the newsworthy to the public. Most of those secrets remain unpublicized even as Snowden also insists that he held much material back. He is good at describing the culture of the intelligence community and especially its IT staff, who hold the keys to the kingdom, with access to data that is otherwise available only to a tiny echelon of top brass. The secrets are generally safe, he writes, only because “tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader applications and policy implications of the projects to which they’re assigned." He was an exception, and therein hangs most of his tale.
Snowden’s book likely won’t change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-250-23723-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2019
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