Clissold’s deep knowledge of Chinese culture and language informs this useful work.
A pragmatic application of good-sense peasant wisdom in negotiating big financial deals with the Chinese.
An investment analyst who returned to his native England with his family in the mid-2000s after 20 years living in China, only to be lured back by a new high-stakes venture in “carbon credits” (“not the black stuff”), Clissold (Mr. China: A Memoir, 2005) chronicles the whole quirky yet lucrative journey. During his years in China, the author had learned to abandon some basic (Western) assumptions about society, business and government: “I’d learned the hard way that if you wanted to survive in China, it had to be on Chinese terms.” As a fluent speaker of Mandarin, Clissold was approached by a fast-talking Australian entrepreneur to help put together a mega-deal that would aid polluting Chinese companies with the installations of new equipment (incinerators available only in Japan) to reduce the country’s enormous greenhouse gas emission crisis. The English syndicate of investors researched horribly polluting factories in places like Hangzhou and helped fund the purchase of incinerators, then offered carbon credits on the eager European market. However, the way of doing business in China was not so straightforward or transparent, and the deal threatened to fall through. Hence the need for Clissold’s particular brand of patient, frequently amusing translation (“even a beast like a thousand-pound ox must lower its head to drink”). Between dispensing old saws about the futility of changing ancient ways, the author walks readers through the first attempts to crack China’s markets, namely by Lord Macartney in 1792, and subsequent resistance to outside change all the way to Mao Zedong. The author’s “rules” of respecting China’s particular way of doing business include the overarching need for stability and the use of indirection, among others.
Clissold’s deep knowledge of Chinese culture and language informs this useful work.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062316578
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | BUSINESS | BUSINESS | WORLD
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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