Mohn chronicles her story of being a fifth-generation member of the family-owned international media conglomerate Bertelsmann, a corporation with more than 100,000 employees in 50 countries.
The author began working for the Bertelsmann Book Club in the 1950s, and she became the protégé of Reinhold Mohn, head of the company and 20 years her senior. Though he was married, the couple had three children together and ultimately married in 1982. Mohn soon began taking on larger projects for the company, such as overseeing the construction of its headquarters. During the ’70s, the author became deeply involved with the Bertelsmann Foundation, which was designed to “work with specialists and with public and private institutions to develop projects.” Mohn has been instrumental in projects in the medical and health care fields and music and the arts, and she stresses the necessity of combining intuition with reason as the formula for success in business and life. The author also discusses the social responsibility of corporations, the role of women in the professional world, the differences between men and women in the workplace and the importance of combining family and work. She touches on globalization, migration, global warming and the debt crisis in Europe. For years, she writes, European leaders refused to confront the problems facing the European Union and purposely withheld information from citizens. “For me,” she writes, “the social unrest that is taking place in Greece and France is the precursor to serious social conflict.”
A straightforward account that will appeal to CEOs, business bloggers, business students and professional women.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3601-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Crown Business
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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