An entrepreneur’s debut memoir takes him from the wilds of Ethiopia to the neon lights of Hollywood.
In 1986, Bogale’s parents were told he’d died in utero, so they traveled to the closest hospital, almost 250 miles from their home in Ethiopia’s Amaro Mountains. After discovering that he was, in fact, alive, they rejoiced and named him “Tariku,” or “the story.” The joy ended, however, when Bogale’s father divorced his mother within a few years and took him away to another village. (Later, when Bogale was living alone, he took in his impoverished mother and siblings.) As a teen, he enrolled in computer classes and started a company called Advanced Computer Technology. The memoir’s action-packed first part is by far its most engaging, painting a vivid picture of the author’s early hardships. After being arrested for faking a Tanzanian passport at 16, Bogale spent months in a nightmarish prison. He finally made it to South Africa, where he hired a white man “to negotiate sometimes,” because local racists didn’t want to pay a black man. Undaunted, he ventured into several other businesses and became rich; he also got married, which didn’t last. Part II is also intriguing, detailing how Bogale built a shopping center after fighting corrupt, powerful forces. In spy-thriller fashion, the memoir takes the author to Switzerland, where he ran afoul of immigration authorities, met an attorney and former model named Naomi, and found that his jackets kept getting stolen. In Part III, Naomi’s doppelgänger (or possibly Naomi herself) reappears in New York; after several rambling pages, however, she simply leaves. Part IV, however, will appeal to fans of lavish Hollywood lifestyles; the author seems extremely label-conscious (he doesn’t just drive—he drives a Mercedes-Benz SL550) and drops famous names, such as director Steven Spielberg’s. Still, Bogale’s friendly narrative voice always emanates confidence: “You might say that I have the heart and the senses of a lion, noble in its bearing, attuned to the sounds and smells of his environment, and able to pounce with great ferocity to make his killing.”
A high-speed, energetic tale of a sometimes-bumpy ride from rags to riches.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9982934-0-0
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Dual Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BUSINESS | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP | BUSINESS | BUSINESS | ENTREPRENUERSHP
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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