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
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A poignantly intimate, revelatory read for Prince fans and music lovers.
A legendary musician and the co-author he chose three months before his death sketch a tantalizing half-finished self-portrait in both words and images.
When Prince died in 2016, he left behind 30 pages of a memoir that his co-writer, Paris Review advisory editor Piepenbring (co-author: Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, 2019), had annotated with the singer’s own expansions and that Prince had intended as a “handbook for the brilliant community: wrapped in autobiography, wrapped in biography.” Remaining scrupulously faithful to that vision, Piepenbring pieces together Prince’s memoir fragments with never-before-seen memorabilia the editor helped excavate from the singer’s Paisley Park vault in Chanhassen, Minnesota. The book opens with Piepenbring’s warm remembrances of their brief association and statement of mission. Though unfinished, the memoir, which is divided into four parts, was to have set forth what Prince called an “an unconventional and poetic journey” that celebrated the creative freedom he prized above all else. Prince remembers the glamorous parents who raised him and whose interpersonal conflicts later fueled much of his creative output. He also reminisces about his hometown, Minneapolis, his worship of his musician father, and his first loves, music being chief among them. The second section, “For You,” consists of photographed images—at once funny and supremely personal—of a scrapbook Prince kept in the years preceding his first album, For You (1978). In “Controversy,” Piepenbring traces the creative work that followed For You and preceded Purple Rain (1984) with images of both the singer and lyrics—complete with Prince’s doodles and corrections—to such classics such as “1999.” The final section, “Baby I’m a Star,” features both handwritten treatments for Prince’s semiautobiographical film, Purple Rain, and Piepenbring’s typewritten version. Laced throughout with quotations from Prince interviews, this visually stunning labor of love reveals the shy, vulnerable man behind the glitz and controversy without ever “punctur[ing] the veil of mystery around him.”
A poignantly intimate, revelatory read for Prince fans and music lovers.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-58965-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2019
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