An often engaging, if sometimes overly complex, remembrance.
A debut spiritual memoir by a prominent businessman and Unitarian Universalist minister.
Sherblom grew up in the little town of Tiverton, Rhode Island. His father, a Baptist minister, struggled to provide for his large family, and they lived in depressing squalor. An ambitious boy, the author set out on a lifelong quest to make something of himself, and he possessed an unusual, complex mixture of business acumen and spiritual hunger. In this detailed accounting, the author effectively uses his own personal story to highlight six guiding spiritual disciplines that have served him well, and which offer a model of personal development. Sherblom has good reason to use his own life as a case study, as he succeeded in ways that most people can only dream of. He attended Yale University, where he found the free-wheeling student libertarian Party of the Right appealing and also campaigned for presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in New Haven’s first ward in 1976. After meeting his wife-to-be, Loretta, the author attended Harvard Business School. “I received highest honors,” Sherblom writes. “This was an inflection point in my life. I would never be poor again.” Much of the book centers on the outstanding business career that the author had in the biotechnology industry, and business-book aficionados may find his detailed, strategic entrepreneurial moves to be of interest. However, the story sometimes gets bogged down in financial minutiae. Each section of this autobiographical chronology deals with a different spiritual discipline: “Resilience,” “Surrender,” “Gratitude,” “Generosity,” Mystery,” and “Awakening.” Along the way, the focus gradually shifts from the business world to the author’s second career as a prominent Unitarian Universalist minister, whose fascination with transcendentalism suits his life in Concord, Massachusetts, near Walden Pond. Indeed, the last two chapters are an intriguing departure from the concrete details of high finance; he shows how he deepened his potential for mystical experience, leading him to multiple spiritual awakenings. Each chapter ends with a set of guided questions to stimulate thinking and discussion.
An often engaging, if sometimes overly complex, remembrance.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63489-076-2
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Wise Ink Creative Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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