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
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
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