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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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