An anthropological business book made in Japan.
Please remove your shoes and please put on your office slippers and learn from a foreigner how to become a lifer in a mighty Japanese conglomerate.
Globetrotter Murtagh, born in Dublin, settles down and discovers how to succeed in business in the world’s most evolved corporate culture. After a suitable graduate education, Muruta-san (his Japanese alias), is issued his Mitsubishi business cards—a testament to his existence. He lodges in a Mitsubishi dormitory, dons his Mitsubishi jacket. He confounds the Mitsubishi eye exam, not calibrated for blue. He attends meetings and lectures. He stays late and keeps his desk tidy. Proficient in the language and married, after a successful courtship of her parents, to clever, pretty Miyuki, Muruta does his best (as required by the Mitsubishi rulebook). He moves from city to city, as necessary. He assumes the suitable salaryman style, paying due obeisance to the honor of the corporation. Muruta becomes a permanent employee—a lifer—as well as a permanent foreigner in a land particularly bewildered by foreigners. (A touch of xenophobia may be evident in a place where people politely remind him that he may have forgotten to go home.) What exactly he does for the firm seems less relevant than the way he does it. “People in Mitsubishi always do what they say they’ll do, as long as it’s in the rulebook.” Of course, Muruta eventually become Murtagh again. He paroles himself and renounces his lifetime commitment to the corporation. His sometimes cynical, always waggish, text refers to customs like proper bowing angles and to corporate flags and anthems. He says nothing concerning hara-kiri.
An anthropological business book made in Japan.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-86197-789-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Profile Books/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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