An interesting tale of how curiosity and entrepreneurship merged to transform TV and education.
A memoir from Hendricks, the founder and chairman of Discovery Communications, the world's leading educational communications and TV company, which boasts more than 400 million subscribers living in 215 countries.
The author tells how he built the basis for his present dreams to provide educational TV services to the 400 million households worldwide that lack electricity by working through the world's village schools. He describes how he had been drawn to the educational power of TV as a child growing up in Alabama in the 1950s. Moving into public service as one of the first lobbyists at the federal level for university programs and then the founder of a newsletter company servicing academic science programs, Hendricks recalls how he prepared for the opportunity that would present itself in September 1982, when he founded “Cable Educational Network,” the predecessor to the Discovery Channel. The author had accumulated insight into the world of documentary films, cable TV and the broadcasting system, as well as the untapped potential of 25 percent of viewers whose interest in scientific and other factual content was going unaddressed, which Hendricks calls “the magic number that would one day create a multibillion-dollar industry.” The author also shares his own view of the characteristics that shape a successful entrepreneur. For Hendricks, the key has always been curiosity, which he views as “the fuel of human progress,” something that can be taught “to anyone, at any age, anywhere in the world.” Recruiting the people and raising the finances to build the capacity called on still other qualities, which the author’s narrative helps bring out. Hendricks also explores the economics of cable broadcasting and where the technology of global educational TV is headed.
An interesting tale of how curiosity and entrepreneurship merged to transform TV and education.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-212855-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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