A unique memoir that provides a rare window into the Saudi kingdom.
A CEO chronicles how Saudi Arabia’s royal family carried out a hostile takeover of the private hospital he led.
Utgard, an American hospital executive with international experience, spent three years in Saudi Arabia, from 1998 to 2001, trying to turn around the struggling Al-Salama Hospital in Jeddah. Its owner, Sheik Khalid Bin Mahfouz, one of the world’s richest men—later rumored to have ties to Osama bin Laden—recruited Utgard through intermediaries. This foreshadowed a consistent pattern: Although holding the title of chief executive, Utgard never dealt directly with the so-called powers that be. In his debut, Utgard tells his story in clear prose and granular detail. From the outset, his assignment appears misbegotten. The board chairman never attends any meetings; a multimillion-dollar remodeling project lacks a written contract and stalls repeatedly over payment disputes; representatives from the royal family’s hospital in Riyadh enthusiastically propose a strategic partnership, then will not return phone calls; deadlines and commitments evaporate like mirages. Subterfuge and misdirection rule the day, symbolized by a euphemism Utgard uses to describe the acquisition: “reverse privatization.” Ample conflict drives the action, and Utgard sketches his characters convincingly, but their dialogue occasionally sounds unnatural since he forces into it explanatory information better left to narration. Meanwhile, the pace bogs down when storytelling yields to documenting the historical record, and detailed accounts of staff meetings and management strategies sometimes read like an academic textbook or legal deposition. On the other hand, the book is highly personal, with insightful observations about Saudi business practices, culture and geography. Utgard, an outdoor enthusiast, peppers the narrative with tales of family vacations, desert road trip and diving in the Red Sea; an entire chapter is a travelogue of places he visited on days off work. This amalgam may prove too personal for some business readers, while managerial minutiae may overwhelm general readers. However, it’s a valuable case study, particularly for anyone in hospital administration, and a broader cautionary tale about the risks of operating private enterprises where governments wield unchecked power.
A unique memoir that provides a rare window into the Saudi kingdom.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 978-1412065658
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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