A memoir for those interested in a personal account of the insurance industry or the author himself.
Smith recounts his troubled youth and his subsequent rise to the top of an insurance company.
Smith had an eventful childhood—he grew up in New York City in the 1950s and California in the ’60s, a shiftless youth who was repeatedly thrown out of school, financed his life with crime, and spent most of his days in a “drug-induced stupor.” While burglarizing a pawnshop, his friend Greg was fatally shot. He was often homeless and had his first failed marriage at 17. He was married three more times before finding marital happiness on the fifth attempt. An opportunity to work for American Income Life, an insurance company, proved to be transformative. Smith had finally discovered something (legal) for which he had a talent; he eventually become agent of the year. Even after experiencing some real success, however, he continued to drink excessively and use cocaine, painkillers, and crack. “Even as I write this all these years later, I can’t even fathom how I functioned on a day-to-day basis back then. It seems impossible now.” Only after a stint in rehab was the author finally able to turn his life around. He married, started a family, and become the president and CEO of the company.
Smith’s inspiring story mixes elements from three genres; he furnishes a memoir, a kind of motivational self-help guide, as well as an introduction to the insurance industry. The arc of Smith’s life is extraordinary—he managed to become an accomplished businessperson and family man after years of drug-addled purposelessness. His candor is also remarkable—he spares no punches when it comes to self-judgment and chronicles his foibles in granular detail. However, his life story remains a familiar one—a rags-to-riches triumph that constitutes a literary genre. The author dwells at great length on the internal machinations of the insurance business, a commentary that is predictably dry and often presented with excruciating specificity. Moreover, the author pivots at one juncture in his remembrance to furnish professional counsel, presumably directed to other insurance salesman, and this section of the book offers nothing new, rehearsing the usual tropes of any book that dispenses career instruction. Also, the author’s writing abounds with clichés, an inclination he all but announces early in the book when he warns the reader to “buckle up.” He describes crack as “cocaine on steroids” and proclaims his love of motivational mantras like “think big,” “opportunity unlimited,” and “step up so others can step in.” Consider this description of New York City in the 1950s, not utterly false but without nuance and clearly exaggerated; still, some may appreciate the straightforward characterization: “The city was rampant with drugs, murders, prostitution, homelessness, and every vice you can think of. Everyone chain-smoked. Everyone acted like assholes.” Smith has lived a memorable life, one almost certainly more gripping than its expression in this volume, and it should be a delightful read for those who know and love him.
A memoir for those interested in a personal account of the insurance industry or the author himself.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-955026-13-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Ballast Books
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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