An engaging cautionary tale with much to teach about business and many relevant socioeconomic issues.
An eastern entrepreneur goes west with calamitous results.
In 2018, 61-year-old Murphy, a self-described “acolyte of the Atlantic establishment,” moved to Colorado. He assumed that because all his other business startups had been successful that he had the savvy and vision to make a fortune growing legal hemp. His timing was prescient, his plan impeccable, his future fragrant. What could go wrong? Just about everything, it seems. Murphy, the author of The Long Haul, is an insightful and incisive observer, not least regarding the cultural differences between his native, class-conscious New England and the more egalitarian Colorado. Though he felt at home with the West’s enterprising spirit, he knew the reality: “There’s a reason the word ‘dream’ appears upon that mythic American pedestal.” The author had his reservations about the hemp business, had no experience in agriculture, and could obtain little useful data on hemp growing; for the most part, he was flying blind. Planting crops on a rocky alluvial plain in a semiarid environment was not ideal, but the prospect proved irresistible. He chronicles his rise and fall with a wicked sense of humor, especially useful in skewering persistent myths of every kind, whether business, ecological, or historical. However, his withering critique of the rugged individualist frontier malarkey and its damaging effects on our society is no laughing matter. Murphy is a capitalist to the core but no fan of what he calls the plague of “corporatocracy,” whose misdeeds he savages. He also tells the true story behind America’s hopelessly misguided war on drugs. Murphy spent 20 years as a long-haul mover, which acquainted him with America’s “underclass,” and few could rival his assessment of the immigrant community and our treatment of it. He never tires “of listening to the life stories of people inhabiting the bottom of the American Dream,” and his book is all the richer for it.
An engaging cautionary tale with much to teach about business and many relevant socioeconomic issues.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781324006107
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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