From nearly dirt poor to filthy rich, it’s his audacious, happy story and he’s sticking to it.
Self-made billionaire Wyly offers a business pep talk wrapped in a memoir.
A Depression baby in Delhi, La., the author grew to maturity in the Texas money patch. That’s about all the personal material he offers, aside from tributes to his parents and brother. His chronicle of lucrative investment begins with a shrewd innovation back in the day when punch cards were state-of-the-art. Expanding from marketing computer-system software, the entrepreneurial Wyly devoted his energies to petroleum, minerals, service stations, seaports, paper and banking. The Bonanza Steakhouse chain and Michaels craft-supply retailers were among his picks. Today the tycoon invests in hedge funds and has embarked on efforts to clean up the environment, all with the fortune derived over four decades from IPOs, takeovers, raids, spin-offs, acquisitions and junk-bond funding by Mike Milken, a financier the author respects. Wyly does not like Charles Wang and his gang at Computer Associates. Though he may sometimes be disappointed with “my boy Bush” (our current president), he ceaselessly adheres to the teachings of, among others, Tom Watson Sr. (the IBM Thinker), Sam Walton (the Sage of Bentonville) and Mary Baker Eddy (founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist). His philosophy is quite folksy. “Business is a lot like football,” he asserts; “roots are good”; “obstacles are only challenges.” His humor is without frills. Asked what would help his business, the manager of Informatics’ Military Division got a good laugh from the suits when he replied, “A good war!” When considering a business, he advises, ask yourself if you can create customers: “Will the dogs eat the dog food?” Wyly may drive a Prius, but his autobiography is authentically Texan.
From nearly dirt poor to filthy rich, it’s his audacious, happy story and he’s sticking to it.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55704-803-5
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Newmarket Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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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