A no-holds-barred account of what it takes to succeed at the highest levels.
Called on to turn around the world's largest insurance company, AIG, which had greatly contributed to a near-complete breakdown of the financial system, former president and CEO Benmosche chronicles how he paid back what the country was owed.
This is a story from the front lines by a corporate warrior who thought of himself as someone who “get[s] the job done”—and repeatedly proved that he could. Up against opponents and critics within the company, government, and other corporations, the author tells how he steered a course among those who wanted to liquidate divisions of AIG as quickly as possible, and he recounts the battles he had to fight to ensure the company's continued viability. He drew on executive experience gained from his previous leadership posts at MetLife, Paine Webber, and Chase Manhattan as well as a stint in the Army. This memoir complements former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s The Courage to Act (2015) and Maurice Greenberg’s The AIG Story (2013), but Benmosche does not retell how the great crisis of 2007-2008 came about. His subject is the aftermath and what it took to save AIG from bankruptcy, restore viability, and repay “the astronomical $182 billion in bailout funds it owed the taxpayers.” The author was recalled from retirement in the middle of the political crisis caused by the revelation that the company was sticking by its bonus policy even though “it had burned through four CEOs in four years.” It did not take him long to discover that no one in the company really knew how big the financial problem was, the full “magnitude of the mess.” The center was AIG's Financial Products division, which had sold the financial derivatives that nearly sank everything else. Ultimately, Benmosche overcame opposition from within and without as he brought the company back to solvency.
A no-holds-barred account of what it takes to succeed at the highest levels.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07218-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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
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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