MISSION: SUCCESS!

In this latest from inspirational writer Mandino, plucky, chaste Luke Gardiner overcomes orphanhood, meets a really swell girl, socks it to the Nazis, and learns how to make four billion trillion dollars from a kindly widow in London. It's flashback time as Luke Gardiner, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, returns to London for the first time since WW II. He's going to build another one of his gigantic, rich, and powerful factories somewhere in Hampstead Heath (!), but with a few hours to kill between rich Concorde flights and powerful Rolls Royce rides, Luke gets to thinking about Winnie Marlow, the gal who taught him all he needed to know about how to be, well, just as rich and powerful as you can imagine. See, Luke wasn't always rich and powerful. Time was when he was just a plain old orphan living with his drunken uncle, with no money to go to a swell school like his girlfriend Priscilla, who gets to go to Wellesley. But, thanks to WW II, Luke gets to join the Air Corps, where he becomes a crack bombardier and meets nice guys from all around the US. Then it's off to England, where a kindly reporter refers Luke to Winnie Marlow's bed-and-breakfast for high-minded boys who don't want to defile themselves. Winnie's from Michigan, but she's made a pile in English sewing shops since widowhood struck, and it turns out that Luke looks just like Winnie's late son, another valiant flier. Now she's going to give Luke a crash course in how to believe in himself enough to win the war and become one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. E-Z Reading for folks who have always thought Horatio Alger and Barbara Cartland ought to get together.