A singularly uncritical and sketchy briefing on Konosuke Matsushita from a Harvard Business School professor whose stated intention is to showcase his subject's extraordinary achievements as object lessons for those who aspire to leadership positions in any endeavor. Drawing mainly on archival material, Kotter (coauthor of Corporate Culture and Performance, 1992) provides a once-over- lightly rundown on how the youngest son of an impoverished family from the Japanese hinterland overcame great adversity to found Osaka-based Matsushita Electric, a transnational corporation (best known in the US for its Panasonic line of consumer goods). After working as a wiring specialist for a public utility, Matsushita (who died at 94 in 1989) went into business for himself in 1917, manufacturing sockets, and hit the sales jackpot five years later with a cheap, reliable bicycle lamp. The still young entrepreneur soon diversified into batteries, radios, and allied products, becoming a commercial force in his homeland's wholesale and retail markets. Kotter all but ignores the thriving company's presumably significant contributions to Japan's WW II effort. After V-J Day, all companies that had supplied the military were ordered by occupation forces to cease production; but quickly receiving approval to resume production of consumer goods, Matsushita Electric recovered apace, expanding its sales horizons to encompass Europe and North America. The author touches without dwelling on the factors that powered the company's postwar growth (inter alia, decentralized management, a willingness to run calculated risks, government restrictions designed to keep foreign rivals out of domestic outlets, and an effective R&D program). Unfortunately, Kotter seldom comes to close grips with the personal qualities that enabled the competitive and demanding entrepreneur to build a world-class industrial enterprise that continues to prosper long after his departure. A bio that verges on hagiography and lacks the saving grace of practicable precepts.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83460-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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