Optimism about America from a man mulling his next expression of civic responsibility.
The former CEO of Starbucks wants to give everyone a chance to be their best selves.
Schultz (Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, 2011, etc.) reflects on his personal and professional journey “to try to answer a vital question of our time: What can we do to effect meaningful change and create the just, fair, and secure future we all desire?” He recounts successes, challenges, and failures as he pursued his goal of creating a profitable business that balances “seemingly competing priorities of humanity and prosperity.” Schultz envisioned Starbucks as more than a coffee shop: a place of respite and community where people would feel welcomed, a “third place,” he calls it, not home or work but rather an escape from both. “Haunted by the anxiety” of his family’s financial insecurity, Schultz wanted to give his employees respect, fair pay, and benefits such as health insurance, stock options, and, eventually, tuition reimbursement. Starbucks, he hoped, would become known “as a great place to work” as well as a place “that fostered human connection over great coffee.” The author comes across as a sensitive—although sometimes naïve and wide-eyed—observer of injustice and a “common-sense” problem-solver open to innovative ideas. In 2014, after the deaths of Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin, for example, he began to ask himself “what the tragic deaths, court rulings, and uprisings revealed about the plight of black people in America today.” As a white, wealthy male, he wondered, “Where had I been?” His response was to mount an initiative called Race Together—a message featured on Starbuck cups and discussed in open forums—which, he was surprised to discover, generated “biting headlines” and satirical jokes. Nevertheless, he believes his decision to focus on race embodied the company’s values “of trying to uphold human dignity by fostering civil conversation about complex topics.” More successful initiatives include college mentoring, job creation for veterans and refugees, and philanthropic giving from the author’s family foundation.
Optimism about America from a man mulling his next expression of civic responsibility.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50944-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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