A heartfelt and cautionary success story incorporating both the deceptive promises of wealth and the life-changing power of...
A former Wall Street hedge fund trader’s transformative turnabout from greed to philanthropy.
Raised in Southern California by a doting mother and a crass, dismissive father, Polk grew up dreaming of the day when the need for money wouldn’t dictate his every choice. In his engrossing debut memoir, the author retraces his beginnings as an overweight youth mercilessly bullied at summer camp and protective of his twin brother, Ben. Polk reinvented himself in high school, and his competitive nature matured as he became voraciously determined to outshine Ben in grades, sports, and dates. Acceptance at Columbia University further fed his overachievement fixation, though things almost derailed after bouts of bulimia, a suspension for theft, and problems involving drugs and alcohol. The memoir picks up narrative tension once Polk shifts his attention to his early 20s, during which his motivation and greed began to surmount his better judgment. A summer internship on a frantic stock market trading floor fueled a drive to succeed in business. Once he was hired on Wall Street, the salary and exorbitant bonuses became intoxicants to Polk, who became addicted to money with an eagerness to adopt the “easy confidence of millionaires.” The author writes with sincerity and passion, traversing over the increasing trouble his greed immersed him in, though it’s clear his behavior is derived more from a self-sabotaging, deep-seated psychological need to accumulate wealth, validation, and for “someone to tell me I was worth being taken care of.” Though Polk impressively aced the Wall Street learning curve and became a high-ranking senior trader, his introspection brought his insatiable avarice, maltreatment of women, and general misery into stark focus. This epiphany, somewhat rare for a self-made millionaire, inspired him to break away and embark on more personally enriching and rewarding humanitarian ventures like the food, education, and empowerment-building program he founded for families in low-income communities.
A heartfelt and cautionary success story incorporating both the deceptive promises of wealth and the life-changing power of self-awareness.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8598-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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