Amway’s legion of employees will reap the most benefits from this prideful, well-intentioned memoir.
Business wisdom from a seasoned professional who built a billion-dollar company from the ground up.
As co-founder of Amway, a leading global health and home-care product retailer, DeVos (Ten Powerful Phrases for Positive People, 2008) discusses his life, his business and the overarching faith that makes his model of compassionate capitalism possible. Raised by Dutch parents during the Great Depression, the author became fascinated and eventually motivated by his grandfather’s “gift for the art of selling,” and he sold organic fruits and vegetables door to door throughout southeast Michigan. Spending his after-class hours washing cars and delivering newspapers, DeVos discovered he wasn’t the only one with an entrepreneurial spirit. He struck up a friendship with classmate Jay Van Andel, a boy who offered to drive him to school for 25 cents per week. Their friendship and business partnership would last a lifetime (Andel died in 2004), through a two-year enlistment in the Air Force during World War II and onward toward a partnership in numerous ventures like a drive-in hamburger stand. Yet nothing was as lucrative as peddling the dietary panacea Nutrilite, an idea that would expand itself into the American Way Association, whose meager beginnings consisted of a basement warehouse and the hopeful appeal of an organic cleansing product. Growth, expansion, a smart reinvestment strategy and lessons like taking “rejection and any negativity in stride” developed Amway into a household name and a well-respected family business. The author further shares his experiences of the purchase of the NBA’s Orlando Magic and a wide array of philanthropic ventures. DeVos isn’t too modest to sell future entrepreneurs on the benefits of his winning—if old-school—combination of conservative values, Christian faith, positivity and hard work.
Amway’s legion of employees will reap the most benefits from this prideful, well-intentioned memoir.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5177-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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