A gripping chronicle by a corporate whistle-blower who achieved a stunning victory.
How one man faced down some of Japan’s top corporate leadership and exposed massive fraud and corruption.
The announcement that Woodford would become the next president of Olympus was headline news. He was one of only a few Westerners to penetrate the heights of the Japanese corporate structure. He had worked his way up the ranks, beginning as a salesman 30 years earlier in what was then a British-owned medical-supply company. In this page turner, he gives a personal account of the enormous gap between his expectations in taking on the job and the stressful, sometimes frightening reality. In March 2011, shortly after he assumed his new position, a small Japanese financial journal published an article detailing how Olympus had acquired three corporations that carried suspicious losses in the range of $1.7 billion. The article suggested money laundering and suspicious criminal connections. As corporate president, the author bore fiduciary responsibility. He immediately asked for clarification about the acquisitions but was met with evasiveness from the former president and his cronies. In response, he returned to the U.K. and hired British auditors to review the suspicious transactions, which had been handled through British banks. Just six months after he had assumed his new position, the Olympus board of directors fired Woodford. After the story became headline news in Western media, the Japanese also conducted an investigation, and the corporate officers involved were charged with fraud and corruption. What was revealed was not money laundering but a deep flaw in the unregulated Japanese corporate structure. Woodford traces the problem back to the 1985 Plaza Accord, which had forced devaluation of the yen by a significant percentage. Export-driven corporations sought to cover up spiraling losses with speculation and financial manipulation of off-balance-sheet liabilities.
A gripping chronicle by a corporate whistle-blower who achieved a stunning victory.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59184-575-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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
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