An ultimately unsurprising contribution to business literature.
Tedlow (Business Administration/Harvard; Giants of Enterprise, not reviewed) profiles Intel guru Andy Grove.
Grove’s life story is, indeed, the American dream: He immigrated to the US in the 1950s, a penniless refugee, and landed a job at Intel, where he eventually served as CEO, overseeing a terrific increase in sales, profits and market capitalization. His Silicon Valley leadership earned him, among other plaudits, the spot as Time’s Man of the Year in 1997. Now a quasi-retired “advisor” to Intel, Grove oversees his family’s philanthropic foundation. Here, Tedlow addresses some of his subject’s more controversial opinions—such as his belief that stock options should not be expensed, because without the incentive provided by stock options, American technological ingenuity would suffer. The author is willing to criticize Grove; he suggests that Intel didn’t benefit from Grove’s intransigence about expensing stock options, and that Grove’s judgment may have been clouded. Even so, Tedlow is clearly an admirer, likening Grove to Benjamin Franklin (both liked to write and refused to let age slow them down), Andrew Carnegie (both immigrants’ lives are rags-to-riches stories) and Odysseus (who, like Grove, was a born leader who refused to accept defeat). But for all these high-flying comparisons, Tedlow’s evaluation of Grove is pedestrian—the central idea seems to be that the key to Grove’s leadership is his willingness to adapt and change. Tedlow explains the technologies like the Pentium processor in terms a layman can follow. But he too frequently falls into cliché: “The future was limitless,” etc. Despite the large body of writing about Grove—including his own memoir, Swimming Across (2001)—Tedlow contends, rightly, that an aura of mystery surrounds the man. What makes him tick? How does he make his business decisions? This biography, based on unfettered access to the subject and those close to him, is engaging and informative, but never fully dispels the mystery.
An ultimately unsurprising contribution to business literature.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2006
ISBN: 1-59184-139-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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
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