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
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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