An unabashedly free-spirited celebration of the power of outside-the-box thinking.
The warmly inspiring account of how a journalist and an artist stumbled into business and founded Banana Republic, one of the most successful clothing chains in retail history.
In 1978, tired of working dead-end jobs, Mel and Patricia Ziegler decided to take the $1,500 they had between them and create “a lifetime free of never having to work for anyone other than [themselves] again.” With no previous business experience to guide them, they began with the idea to sell safari-style clothing purchased from military-surplus warehouses. And so they embarked on their retail adventure, relying on luck, resourcefulness and their respective skills as a storyteller and a visual artist. They created a mail-order catalog that broke all the rules of direct marketing, bluffed their way into getting the merchandise they couldn't pay for and started their first shop in an almost invisible location "on the dark side of a side street two long blocks from the edge of the retail center of Mill Valley.” Thanks to unexpected media exposure, however, their tiny store was soon filled with customers looking for distinctive quality clothing that conveyed "character, charisma, and class.” By 1982, Banana Republic had grown large enough that it attracted the attention of Gap founder Don Fisher, who bought the company but kept the Zieglers in charge. The company continued to break sales records, but as it did, Fisher's desire to make Banana Republic into a money-making mega-chain devoid of its trademark playfulness and individuality eventually forced the Zieglers to walk away. Told as a dual-voiced narrative that alternates between Mel’s and Patricia's points of view and illustrated throughout with sketches and images featured in the early catalogs, the story offers refreshing insight into the possibilities of achieving success and maintaining personal integrity in a hyperformulaic world.
An unabashedly free-spirited celebration of the power of outside-the-box thinking.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8348-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
