Amway’s legion of employees will reap the most benefits from this prideful, well-intentioned memoir.
Business wisdom from a seasoned professional who built a billion-dollar company from the ground up.
As co-founder of Amway, a leading global health and home-care product retailer, DeVos (Ten Powerful Phrases for Positive People, 2008) discusses his life, his business and the overarching faith that makes his model of compassionate capitalism possible. Raised by Dutch parents during the Great Depression, the author became fascinated and eventually motivated by his grandfather’s “gift for the art of selling,” and he sold organic fruits and vegetables door to door throughout southeast Michigan. Spending his after-class hours washing cars and delivering newspapers, DeVos discovered he wasn’t the only one with an entrepreneurial spirit. He struck up a friendship with classmate Jay Van Andel, a boy who offered to drive him to school for 25 cents per week. Their friendship and business partnership would last a lifetime (Andel died in 2004), through a two-year enlistment in the Air Force during World War II and onward toward a partnership in numerous ventures like a drive-in hamburger stand. Yet nothing was as lucrative as peddling the dietary panacea Nutrilite, an idea that would expand itself into the American Way Association, whose meager beginnings consisted of a basement warehouse and the hopeful appeal of an organic cleansing product. Growth, expansion, a smart reinvestment strategy and lessons like taking “rejection and any negativity in stride” developed Amway into a household name and a well-respected family business. The author further shares his experiences of the purchase of the NBA’s Orlando Magic and a wide array of philanthropic ventures. DeVos isn’t too modest to sell future entrepreneurs on the benefits of his winning—if old-school—combination of conservative values, Christian faith, positivity and hard work.
Amway’s legion of employees will reap the most benefits from this prideful, well-intentioned memoir.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5177-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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