A sturdy, detailed work of history that will appeal to business readers as well as aficionados of railroading and the Old...
The West wasn’t won with six guns alone. Well-greased skillets helped, too, especially in the hands of Fred Harvey’s cooks.
By journalist and pop historian Fried’s account, 19th-century British immigrant Fred Harvey was “the founding father of the American service industry.” That doesn’t strictly translate into low-wage, go-nowhere jobs, however. Harvey arrived in America with practically nothing, built a small nest egg, was swindled by an early partner and worked diligently to build a fortune again. He was a close observer of the restaurant trade in New York, and he understood the value of paying cash and refusing to extend or receive credit, and, crucially, of buying the best-quality goods that one can afford. The result, after decades of Horatio Alger–like self-improvement, hard work and voracious book-learning, was a chain of restaurants that went West with the Army and the railroads. As Fried (Husbandry: Sex, Love & Dirty Laundry—Inside the Minds of Married Men, 2007, etc.) notes, it was through Harvey’s labors that travelers beyond the Mississippi could get a decent, often excellent, meal. “He suspected there was money to be made if he could just figure out a way to dependably deliver palatable food at fair prices without any bait and switch,” writes the author. And so Harvey did. He brought in fresh steaks, eggs and bread by the boxcar, hired vivacious “Harvey Girls” to wait tables, imported chefs from Europe, set in motion the international trade in Native-American crafts and made piles of money while retaining his fundamental decency. Fried’s immensely readable narrative stretches from Harvey’s time into the empire as run by his children and grandchildren, a slow decline that proves the rule that family-run enterprises seldom last more than three generations—and are almost certainly looted and left for dead by the time the great-grandchildren come along.
A sturdy, detailed work of history that will appeal to business readers as well as aficionados of railroading and the Old West.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-553-80437-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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