Good reading for budding businesspeople.
The founder of Ameritrade delivers a blend of memoir and entrepreneurial manifesto.
While he never quite slips into Ayn Rand territory, Ricketts, who founded Ameritrade as a vehicle for simplifying stock trading for a mass audience, strikes the pose of businessperson as hero and artist: “Business was an act of creativity and courage. Other people didn’t seem to see it this way, but to me, business was where life came alive.” For all that, it was a slog for him at first. The author recounts starting out as a credit reporter in the 1960s, taking his father’s advice that exposure to a variety of businesses would be useful to him in his career, whether a hamburger franchise or a wholesale furniture warehouse. Connecting the lessons he had learned in economics classes with the real world, he became a broker in an era when the Dow was about to break 1,000 and, “for the first time since the stock market crash of 1929, large numbers of individual investors had jumped into the market,” fueling the rise of the newfangled mutual fund. His breakthrough came a decade later, when he figured out how to trim costs by inducing customers to come to him, eliminating the need for commissioned reps, and otherwise “disintermediating” to offer trades at $25 a pop. Bingo: The phone started ringing from customers “who didn’t want advice, just a better deal.” However, as Ricketts recounts, technical challenges were constant companions, from computers that would backfire with static electricity to the need for equipment that could keep up with the speed of real-time trading in the days before the quants and algorithms took over. Securities and Exchange Commission challenges, fraud, troubles with risk-averse partners, and other bugs posed problems as well. Ricketts fights them off page after page, all while extolling the need for nonconformity in the quest for getting “some happiness and satisfaction out of doing something new."
Good reading for budding businesspeople.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6478-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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