An ultimately unsurprising contribution to business literature.
Tedlow (Business Administration/Harvard; Giants of Enterprise, not reviewed) profiles Intel guru Andy Grove.
Grove’s life story is, indeed, the American dream: He immigrated to the US in the 1950s, a penniless refugee, and landed a job at Intel, where he eventually served as CEO, overseeing a terrific increase in sales, profits and market capitalization. His Silicon Valley leadership earned him, among other plaudits, the spot as Time’s Man of the Year in 1997. Now a quasi-retired “advisor” to Intel, Grove oversees his family’s philanthropic foundation. Here, Tedlow addresses some of his subject’s more controversial opinions—such as his belief that stock options should not be expensed, because without the incentive provided by stock options, American technological ingenuity would suffer. The author is willing to criticize Grove; he suggests that Intel didn’t benefit from Grove’s intransigence about expensing stock options, and that Grove’s judgment may have been clouded. Even so, Tedlow is clearly an admirer, likening Grove to Benjamin Franklin (both liked to write and refused to let age slow them down), Andrew Carnegie (both immigrants’ lives are rags-to-riches stories) and Odysseus (who, like Grove, was a born leader who refused to accept defeat). But for all these high-flying comparisons, Tedlow’s evaluation of Grove is pedestrian—the central idea seems to be that the key to Grove’s leadership is his willingness to adapt and change. Tedlow explains the technologies like the Pentium processor in terms a layman can follow. But he too frequently falls into cliché: “The future was limitless,” etc. Despite the large body of writing about Grove—including his own memoir, Swimming Across (2001)—Tedlow contends, rightly, that an aura of mystery surrounds the man. What makes him tick? How does he make his business decisions? This biography, based on unfettered access to the subject and those close to him, is engaging and informative, but never fully dispels the mystery.
An ultimately unsurprising contribution to business literature.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2006
ISBN: 1-59184-139-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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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