A candid, straightforward account of one man and his rise from rags to riches.
The lifelong journey from shoeshine boy to construction mogul.
Born in Atlanta in 1930, Russell was no stranger to hard work. From the age of 6, he tended his family's chickens; when he turned 8, he had a paper route; by 11, he was mixing mortar for his father's plastering company. "The truth is that I always wanted to work,” he writes. “Everyone I knew and respected worked, and worked hard." From those earliest moments, Russell, who wrote this book with the assistance of veteran business writer Andelman (Why Men Watch Football—A Report from the Couch, 2013, etc.), knew the key to success was to consistently strive to do his best. He broke racial barriers while segregation was still deeply entrenched in the South and established a construction company that built everything from apartment buildings to airports. He used his hard-earned money and astute business sense to help those at the forefront of the civil rights movement by providing much-needed monetary funds and behind-the-scenes support for Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Seeing there was a lack of bankers willing to support blacks, Russell branched out to provide banking and insurance for his community in Atlanta and eventually was invited to join the all-white chamber of commerce. One venture and connection fed into another, with Russell understanding the importance of networking long before it was hip to do so. "I'm often asked how I could have owned a portfolio of almost two thousand rental units, a property management company, and an insurance agency before the age of forty,” he writes. He honestly admits he was judicious with his spending and always reinvested in the company before allowing himself personal luxuries. Family and friends played an important role in Russell's life, as well, and his memories of fond moments are interspersed throughout the story of the rise of his successful businesses.
A candid, straightforward account of one man and his rise from rags to riches.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61374-694-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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
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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