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THE UNCHARTED PATH

Name: THE UNCHARTED PATH
Author: Lee Myung-bak
ISBN: 978-1-4022-6291-3

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEE MYUNG-BAK

by Lee Myung-bak ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2011

Intermittently engaging but ultimately disappointing and incomplete.

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South Korean president Lee’s rags-to-riches account of his life within the byzantine world of that nation’s business and politics.

At the end of the Korean War, both South Korea and 12-year-old Lee were mired in desperate poverty. “Poverty,” writes Lee, “clung to my family like a leech.” Yet a few decades later South Korea became a world economic power and Lee, at age 35, the president and CEO of South Korea’s most powerful family-owned conglomerate (or chaebol), Hyundai. Lee’s story of his rise is one of absolute commitment to sacrifice and hard work—not uncommon attributes of his generation. He takes readers inside Hyundai, recounting tales of business ventures around the world. He tells of his often-strained relations with Hyundai founder and patriarch, Chung Ju-yung, of internecine battles with other chaebol such as Samsung and of precarious dealings with the military dictatorship that ran South Korea well into the 1980s. While the head of Hyundai, Lee was arrested and interrogated by the authorities. Throughout, the author has little to say about South Korea’s dramatic transition to democracy except that he supported it. He says nothing of the seminal role the struggles of Hyundai-connected labor unions played in that transition. As for his role in politics, which he began after leaving Hyundai in 1991, Lee displayed the same determination that led him to the top of the car manufacturer. Here too, though, there is a vagueness that may leave Western readers baffled. The political part of his story was added to the original version of this book published in 1995, and it has a hurried quality to it. Events unfold in a chronologically haphazard manner, and key elements of South Korean politics such as the role of regionalism and the deep power of political parties are mentioned but left unexplained. While Lee does offer a detailed study of his successful run as mayor of Seoul, which literally transformed the city, he remains largely silent on his rise to the presidency.

Intermittently engaging but ultimately disappointing and incomplete.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4022-6291-3

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Sourcebooks

Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)