by Willis Johnson Marla J. Pugh ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2014
A memoir full of entrepreneurial spirit that may be inspirational to readers trying to make it in business on their own.
A fast-acting entrepreneur with a positive attitude, good gut instincts and endless energy relates how he made money on junked autos in thisdebut memoir.
In 1972, Vietnam veteran Johnson started his business with nothing but a 5-acre auto dismantling yard east of Sacramento. But he relentlessly expanded and innovated, eventually founding Copart, an international online auto auction, and taking it public. This is no mean achievement for a man from very humble beginnings. His first teacher was his father, who knew his way around the auto-wrecking trade and could spot good deals—even if he had to learn about them by listening to his wife read aloud from the local newspaper’s classified section. In this memoir, the son, now in retirement, tells a classic story of second-generation success, although he leaves the actual writing to his former Copart communications director, debut author and former journalist Pugh. Her professionally rendered account of Johnson’s steady, upward climb makes for engaging reading; it even includes chapter subheadings with motivational messages to good effect. However, Johnson’s unalloyed first-person voice is lost, and Pugh isn’t given to critical appraisal. Johnson is shown as trustworthy, decisive and God-fearing, putting family first but working himself to the bone, and all in all, he emerges as a man with something extra. But the narrative goes only as far as Johnson wants to take it, and the focus softens during rougher patches or when exploring the interstices of his little-understood industry. For example, the book laments the devastation and flooding in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as a prelude to disclosing that its aftermath was a bonanza for auto salvagers. However, it doesn’t detail how these swamped vehicles worked their way through salvaging, leaving readers unenlightened about the afterlife of water-damaged auto parts.
A memoir full of entrepreneurial spirit that may be inspirational to readers trying to make it in business on their own.Pub Date: March 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490816593
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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