Book Description
What would legendary Boston Celtics coach and 16-time NBA champion Red Auerbach say is the most critical quality for a person to be successful? Would his advice differ from 10-time NCAA championship coach John Wooden's? What would each say to a young person just starting out in pursuit of their dreams? What is the best advice they were ever given?
It took author Christian Klemash more than two years of research, persistence, and original interviews, but now he's ready to pass on the best advice you'll ever get. Only the rare individual has had the opportunity to pick the brain of just one legendary sports coach—let alone thirty-four of the best sports coaches of all time. Klemash gives sports fans a once-in-a-lifetime chance to learn valuable life lessons from the most famous, intelligent, and victorious coaches ever. The legends span the sports world, from gold medal-winning gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi and three-time college football championship coach Tom Osborne to four-time World Series-winning baseball manager Joe Torre and hall-of-fame boxing trainer Angelo Dundee.
These coaches know how to teach top athletes about character and winning, how to manage pressure at crunch time, and how to bring out the best in their players when it matters most. How to Succeed in the Game of Life shares their insights into sports, life, and the most vital keys to sustain success.Featuring Exclusive Interviews with:
Red Auerbach, 16-time NBA World Champion
Bobby Bowden, College Football's All-Time Winningest Coach, 2-time National Champion
Scotty Bowman, 9-time Stanley Cup Champion
Bill Cowher, Super Bowl Champion
Tony Dungy, Super Bowl Champion
Dan Gable, 15-time NCCA Champion
April Heinrichs, Gold Medal Winning Coach of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team
Bela Karolyi, The World’s Greatest Gymnastics Coach
Bill Parcells, 2-time Super Bowl Champion
Emanuel Steward, Boxing Trainer of 30 World Champions
Joe Torre, 4-time World Series Champion
Bill Walsh, 3-time Super Bowl Champion
Lenny Wilkens, NBA’s All-Time Winningest Coach, NBA Champion
John Wooden, 10-time NCAA Champion
And More!
Customer Reviews:
A Great Read.......2007-08-26
Wow!Could not put it down.An extraordinay self help book.Gave it to my kids they loved it.Don't miss this one
What a great read!.......2007-07-25
I took it on vacation with me and I couldn't put it down. A great book for aspiring athletes and coaches as well as your average Joe who works 9-5. The coaches discuss a variety of topics from their childhood to how they motivate their players. Any easy read for all ages.
Game of life.......2007-07-24
I've read through Game of Life and I enjoyed it very much. There are so many things to take from this book, not just into sports, but also some reflections on life. I would recommend this book to everybody.
Coaching advise from athletic coaches.......2007-06-27
A fun read, especially if yoiu're a sports fan. I read it in search of things that would help my own ability as a coach in my company. Much of it is light stuff but the easy read makes it fun nonetheless and there are few golden nuggets laced throughout the book.
Overcome Adversity.......2007-04-12
Anyone looking for inspiration, either for their own life or to share with others, will find a gold mine of quotes here. This book isn't just for sports fans.
Amazon.com
In My Bloody Life, Reymundo Sanchez tells a chillingly sad tale, from his birth in the back of a pickup truck in Puerto Rico to the day he quit the Latin Kings gang, 21 years later. From the first page, his narrative is unpretentious, disarmingly honest, and horrifyingly riveting. His early years were so full of pain and abuse that by the time he opts, at age 11, to hang out with the local gang, the Latin Kings, it seems a perfectly logical choice. In his shoes, any one of us--smacked nightly by a mother and beaten ragged whenever the stepfather got the chance--would likely have chosen the same path. The gang was the family that accepted him as well as the peer group that offered girls who didn't say "no." Any violence that went with the territory couldn't match the atmosphere of brutality that permeated his own home.
Sanchez was a Latin King for six years and participated in innumerable bloody gang battles--years rife with sex, drugs, booze, and acts of gang revenge. He finally got up his pluck to leave (and the only way was to be "violated" out through a gang beating), but admits in his conclusion that life since then has, in some ways, been even harder. He's had to quit drugs, lose the only community he's known, support himself, and deal with the nightmares of all the horrors he's seen and done. Though Sanchez still hasn't accomplished his dream of completing college, he has managed to leave the Kings, leave Chicago, leave behind his mother's legacy of violence, and write an impressive first book. --Stephanie Gold
Book Description
Looking for an escape from childhood abuse, Reymundo Sanchez turned away from school and baseball to drugs, alcohol, and then sex, and was left to fend for himself before age 14. The Latin Kings, one of the largest and most notorious street gangs in America, became his refuge and his world, but its violence cost him friends, freedom, self-respect, and nearly his life. This is a raw and powerful odyssey through the ranks of the new mafia, where the only people more dangerous than rival gangs are members of your own gang, who in one breath will say they’ll die for you and in the next will order your assassination.
Customer Reviews:
Should be required reading at all highschools........2007-06-22
For all of those people who ask -- Why gangs? This book exists. This boy who really didn't even want to be a gangster gets pulled into the undertow and becomes one of the most violent. If all teens could read this, gang activity might keep slowing down.
Wake Up!!.......2007-05-21
This is a great book. It'll let you feel the truth behind the "hard core" thug image. It will blow any preconceived notions of "gang banger" out! They are still kids, struggling to stay alive, this proves it. Not an easy read for anyone with any empathy for others, Reymundo Sanchez will force you to feel and experience some of what he did!! Extremely commmendable- I wish there were more books like this.
sorry!.......2007-04-02
I hate to give bad reviews to anyone else's hard work because one's relationship to art is essentially subjective. I just feel compelled to give an honest review in the case of this book. This story is not very well written. It is really difficult to find anything satisfying about this story and charcters at all. I was looking for a book to use for an adult literacy class. Sadly, this book is not it. The descriptions given by the narrator are lifeless retellings of horrible violence in strictly temporal terms. It was somewhat boring in that the characters were superficial and difficult to care about and the actions lacked purpose. Perhaps reviewers here viewed the story through a different lense than mine. Like I said, art is subjective. Unfortunately, I live and work with the horrible distruction described in the book, and the narrator does little than describe and profit from the destruction. Again, I'm sorry for writing anything negative. I just want to recommend that anyone looking to use this book for educational purposes should think about trying another book.
Deserves to be well-read.......2006-12-28
This is a well-written book that deserves to be well-read. Told in autobiographical style, it helped me understand gang culture much more deeply than I did before.
This is an extremely graphic story, but we can't shield our youth from a reality that many already experience in some form or another. I would definitely consider using selections from this book with my high school students during our study of gangs. Although the author in no way intends to glorify gang-life I can't help but wonder if some younger readers might walk away from this book without fully absorbing the dangers associated with all of the author's activities--not just his explicitly violent acts.
The author doesn't provide any easy answers but if you read between the lines the implications are clear: Urban areas need job programs, expanded youth activities leagues, increased education funding and community policing/anti-police brutality programs. Rather than clipping at the branches, we need to deal with the roots of gangs and gang violence.
HE LIVED A LIFE!!!.......2006-12-09
this is a very good book. i couldn't put it down at all. their was a teacher that left a comment here. saying he hated this book due too, this is how his students think or some trash like that. well, this is how you can reach your students. you already took a step in the direction to see where their heads are at. so, you should read this and understand it. then use this to talk to your students. if they refuse to get more out of life after you talk to them. that isn't on you. you tryed to help them. i am 31 years old. i love this book.
Book Description
Looking into the head and heart of a man who rose above a life of narcotics, violence, and fast money to become someone with his own voice and dreams, this memoir humanizes the dilemma many youngsters face today and underscores the role the streets play as both proving ground and educational institution. By the age of 9, Buddy Burrel was a millionaire with his own flourishing crime empire, having followed in the footsteps of his iron-willed, often-brutal father, a West-Side Chicago kingpin. A gang chief in the powerful Vice Lords family at the age of 11, Burrel attracted the attention of Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo, an infamous boss of the Chicago outfit, under whose tutelage he rose to become a serious player at the age of 16. Yet after realizing he had the wherewithal to lead a different life, Burrel turned from ghetto grit—his father's house, the gangs, the hard drugs, and the streets—to glitz and glamour. Immersed in a world of coast-to-coast living, golf, gambling, and entrepreneurism, populated with idiosyncratic characters and underscored by a painful emotional awakening, he eventually broke away from the dark side with his spirit, heart, and hopefulness intact.
Customer Reviews:
What an amazing story.......2007-05-20
This book is something else - what a page turner! For me, reading Tattoos had the same effect as going to Vegas - I developed a swagger like an unstoppable VIP, and suddenly, a wallet full of $100 bills didn't seem like an impossible goal. For those who commented that some of the stories are unbelievable, open your eyes: this kind of money exchanges hands in legal and illegal enterprises every day. Burrel has given us a rare glimpse into the world of big thinkers. Okay, sure, it's the literary version of a daredevil's televised stunt: kids, don't try this at home. But I think he does a good job of explaining WHY the gangsta life is ultimately self-defeating. Bravo!
REAL TATTOOS.......2006-11-11
It's raw reality, hard to swallow-but still true! He shows the glamour and the seduction of a successful gang leader, but as you keep on reading, he makes clear how shallow, empty and lifeless was his life. How easy to get in and how hard to get out! It trilled me to follow the thoughts that would lead him to get out of it all. Finally, he ends up giving it back - a confession to inspire personal growth without being a self-help book.
So true and so powerful!.......2006-11-08
The first thing that called my attention was the book's title. I got totally hooked on this true story of a man who survived the best and the worst - many times in the same day. Burrel's story stood up to the powerful title. His character, his persona, his friends jump out of the page from beginning to end. I was very impressed that he had courage and determination not only to get out of the thug-business, but also to tell everything to the public. It's a story of survival indeed. Told by a man who has been there, seen that, done that. And that's one of the reasons that Burrel has the authority to talk about crime, drugs and the worst of the world with clarity and knowledge to people around the world - not just ghettos.
A waste of money.......2006-11-04
This ghetto dude glorifies a life of pimpin,druggin,and other illicit business's he spends about 2 pages in the book talking about his so called new profession as a life coach and mentor. I saw him on the news show fox thing in the morning in chicago and from the title of the book and his so called conversion from being a thug to being an honest businessman made me want to support the brother, but after reading this book I wished I had saved my money!
I get the impression he is still probebly doing stuff that is illegal and his story is not one I would want my children or anyone I know imulating! Life Coach? Pulezze! There are alot of hardworking folks who grew up poor and made it without all of the activities he is glorifying in this book. This book is a waste of money!
artj
Weak, but mildly amusing.......2006-10-14
If you can get past the over-the-top exagerations, you might even finish this book.
Example (pages 57 & 58):
"The most gut-wrenching loss I personally experienced was a $10 million betting disaster when I was 17."
"They were all kingpins, sitting on ridiculous cash surpluses."
"They played, as did I, soley with C-notes..."
"The pot was brewing, $30 million strong..."
$30 million is the equivilent of 300,000 C-notes...just how big was the table?
Customer Reviews:
Thank you Carrie Lindsey.......2007-10-05
"By excluding the work of women artists from history, men not only maintain control of women, but also of the world." Judy Chicago, original V-Warrior and PoMo high priestress, turned that tide. Dogmatic, didactic, hyperliteral and hypercritical, her influence (even before The Dinner Party) cannot be underestimated. This is 'back in the day' when art had a 'message,' but, all that, Chicago nevertheless ushered in today's chaos, and yesterday's identity politics, with her clever use of 'fem' (low) art elements and stubborn insistence on remembering all founding sisters. Duchamp met his match - and, bringing high icongraphy to 'women's lib,' the 1980s were born.
Judy Chicago; Goddess of the Art World!.......2001-01-02
Judy Chicago is such an intimate person, very emotional in her work, and through this book, you will grow to understand why and how she produced work in her very own style of emotion. She is truely a Goddess of Art, and a very strong women of which I could only strive to be! This book is so empowering, read it if you have any doubts about your place as a women dealing with being an artist. BRAVO!!
Just a terrific little book!.......1999-06-21
What a wonderful book this is; so inspired, so inspiring. Judy Chicago is simply brilliant. She has challenged patriarchal tyranny so courageously and insightfully that you can read this book again and again with acute pleasure.
Wonderful.......1998-04-28
This is a terrific book that demonstrates that women are able to persevere with their art even though males are trying to stop us. It seems that the white male patriarchal art world will continue to try to silence us, BUT WE WILL BE HEARD! I salute all my sisters in their struggle to produce art that, while disturbing white males, will prove that it is women who are making the most significant art in the world today. Judy Chicago has won again!
WONDERFUL! WONDERFUL! WONDERFUL!.......1997-05-08
This book was like a loyal companion as I experienced my own struggles as a woman artist. I commend Judy Chicago for sharing her experiences, personal decisions, and insights. Reading this particular book helped me to finish my most recent exhibition of work.
Thank you, Judy!
Book Description
A select group of 28 Chicago Bears players offer intimate private remembrances of legendary games and how they reacted to the spotlight. Big touchdowns, career-making moments, and championship glory shared all come to the surface for Bears of the past half-century. Hall of Famers like Dick Butkus, Gale Sayers, Mike Singletary, and Stan Jones, along with current stars like Brian Urlacher, reflect on special plays and special games.
Customer Reviews:
Great Gift for Bears Fans.......2006-12-28
I got this for my Dad on Christmas and all my brothers kept passing it around all day reading different entries. All the player's stories are only a few pages long so this makes for a great short story book that can be read for 10 or 15 minutes then put down, and revisited. All the Bears fans in my life loved it! I guess some of the people in it are pretty rare interviews and my Dad and brothers were so interested to see which games the different players would choose to discuss in this book. They all would guess which game they were going to talk about before they checked that section.
Book Description
A unique look at the evolution of modern art in America, from art historian and eminent former curator of the Chicago Art Institute Katharine Kuh, a key figure in opening Americas eyes to contemporary art. Any artist worth his salt is in advance of his time, writes Katharine Kuh. Picasso, Duchamp, Lger, Mir, Braque, Chagall, Klee, Calder, Davis, Hopper, Weston, Rothko, Arensberg, Dale, Philips. These are just a few of the artists, photographers, and collectors Katharine Kuh knew and worked with during her long career. One of Americas pivotal forces in the arts for over four decades, she began with her own gallery in Chicago in the early 1930s. To sell contemporary art in post-Depression America was almost suicidal, but with guts and gumption Kuh survived. In 1954, the Chicago Art Institute named her its first curator of modern arta position of great prestige. Over the next 26 years, scouring the world, she acquired some of the most famous pieces in the institutes collection, and formed close relationships with the artists themselves. Here she gives us insights into their personal lives, their creative influences, and the way they worked. After her death in 1998, noted art historian Avis Berman, Kuhs literary executor, selected her key writings for this book.
Customer Reviews:
Provides a moving memoir.......2006-11-07
In the 1930s interest in modern art was low - but Katharine Kuh opened a gallery in Chicago anyway, exhibiting many then-obscure artists form Paul Klee to Ansel Adams and Marc Chagall. Her passion for modern art fostered their careers and led to a world-wide revitalization of interest, documented here in a blend of modern art history and autobiography. Her friend Avis Berman, a art historian, edited her writings for this book after Kuh's death: it provides a moving memoir of a life in the art world at a time when her artists' visionary works weren't widely recognized.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
my love affair with modern art.......2006-11-04
This is a wonderful book. It consists of short vignettes about the author's interaction with artists she met in the course of her career as a curator at the Chicago Institute of Art and later as a gallery owner. Her insight and her ability to describe the artists are wonderful. The story about Edward Hopper was just great!!
Good description of an artsy fartsy world!.......2006-07-06
Sometimes during my read of this book I would find myself asleep but you can be sure I kept coming back. I certainly have a new appreciation for K. Kuh's modern art world and since I was able to visit the Institute of Arts in Chicago it was practically nostalgic. I think sometimes one gets so much of an education that it pushes one beyond the basic human side and one forgets that inevitably everybody takes a dump. I never realized all of the politics and tedium involved with being a museum curator. I had to look up some big words which means it broadened my horizons; right? Maybe... I enjoyed reading this book, was a bit over the top and for a hard cover book I had hoped for more photos.
Back in the day, and what a day.......2006-06-27
As a general reader with an appreciation for art, I loved MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MODERN ART. It is a vital and highly readable document of one of the most important eras in art history.
Katharine Kuh (1904 - 1994) was a gallery owner, then curator, then art critic (Saturday Review) and in the course of her long career, she came to know the international movers and shakers. Many came to trust her and call her their friend and shared their private lives and ideas about art with her. She outlived just about all who parade across her pages--each chapter profiles a different artist or collector--and had the luxury of reflection at the end of her life to select what about each personage mattered most. For example, though she opens the chapter on Mark Rothko with the tragedy of his 1970 suicide, that's not how she wants him remembered and thus her story emphasizes what he was like twenty years before as he struck his flow. The chapter on world-class collector Bernard Berenson seems anomalous at first--his heart was pre-Modern--but in many ways the story of such a man living in the heart of the Modern era is quite revealing. That is the one chapter where the very private Kuh allows for some self revelation as well.
The portraits of the lights like Brancusi, Hopper, Noguchi and Kline, to name a few, are priceless, and they offer Kuh a chance to discuss a number of issues, including the dynamics of cultivating collectors in hopes of donations to museums, government interference, general public taste, fakes, curating a retrospective exhibit, and artists' estates. Though she keeps the attention on the artists, Kuh comes through as a very interesting person, one who chose to go against the conventional choices for women of her time. Avis Berman, who edited and completed the book posthumously, has kept Kuh's extraordinary voice intact without a quiver.
The Buyer should know that..........2006-04-15
while the writing is superb, this costly edition is printed on the cheap. At a minimum, the pages with pictures should have been in full color on glossy stock. Kuh would have been ashamed.
Book Description
This memoir is about Clancy Sigal's intense attachment to his fast-talking, redhaired, sexy, unwed mother Jennie, a firebrand union organizer, and his roaring Oedipal rivalry with his mostly absent father Leo who carries a gun to social occasions.
In the wide-open, violent Chicago of the Depression and war years, Jennie, in her Cuban heels and flaming lipstick, is a single mother on welfare trying to raise a wild rebellious son in a twilight world between law and lawlessness. She is defiant, vulnerable, sexually alive, high stepping, man-loving, woman-friendly, wisecracking — fearlessly facing down hostile scabs armed with shotguns and clubs. Along with the portrait of Jennie, this book tells a rollicking, profane, and gritty tale of bottom-feeding street life, race riots, riding the rails, and what happens when a gang boy is mistakenly sent to an all-girls’ high school.
Customer Reviews:
Oh, my Mama.......2007-02-02
This book works on many levels:
1. OK, if you just want a good read, Clancy tells the story of his growing up with his long suffering mother, Jennie, in a humorous, compelling, self-deprecating and insightful way. He evokes urban life in the poverty-ridden Depression many would have liked to forget, but which, for Clancy, seems to have been the most alive time of his life. But aside from that -
2. History
(a) A must have for the Chicago Historical Society library. A detailed description of life in one particular Chicago neighborhood in the 1930's Depression and WWII years. Clancy describes life as a working-class, street kid where the neighborhood and his fellow adolescent (by today's standards fairly harmless) gang members are a whole world and all a guy needs.
(b) Also a must for students of Jewish American history. An on-the-ground, day-to-day account of what it was like to be a very secular Jewish American kid at the time and how he, his mother, their friends and their world tried to define their Jewishness.
(c) For political history you get mother, Jennie, and usually absent father, Leo, who are both hard core labor organizers with a commitment forged by the often life or death pre-WWII American labor movement. It is also a reminder of when America had real Socialists and real Communists, who were bigger enemies of each other than of the capitalists.
3. Sociology/Psychology
(a) Jennie, a Russian immigrant, ostracised by her Communist, New York family when she ran off with the faithless socialist, Leo. Single mother of an illegitimate child working as a seamstress and covert union organizer to support herself and her child. Clancy thoughtfully observes and analyzes the stresses and social pressures his mother and similar women of the era suffered and how these shaped Jennie's, and their, characters.
(b) Clancy also tells, again with much self-deprecating humor, the effect all this had on him, not only growing up but how it shaped his future life, and how it is still shaping the next generation, his son. (See also Clancy's novel, Zone of the Interior, based on his experiences with psychiatrist R. D. Laing.)
What a mother, what a son!.......2006-10-03
Clancy Sigal's seeringly honest portrait of his lefty mother, Jennie, and himself brings alive a time now lost forever to Ipods, computers, and cell phones.
Clancy's childhood as the sidekick of a passionate labor organizer mother often working undercover, slipping into town and skulking out when the jig is up is both hair-raising and thrilling. Even when she settles temporarily in Chicago, a secure home life is not an option for his mother, Jennie, and his on-again, off-again father. Jennie's commitment to lifting up the plight of exploited workers while bringing up Clancy is the ultimate juggling act. Lots of dropped balls but a virtuoso performance nevertheless. Clancy was mostly left to his own devices, a street kid whose aspirations were hardly more than rough and tumble fun with his little gang of misfits balanced with an instinct for survival.
Ultimately, Jennie was his salvation even after he left home because she had implanted in him a moral compass more powerful than any microchip that always corrected his course throughout his crazy life journey. He's a lucky boy/man.
This book is a tribute to an extraordinary mother and a rollicking good read at that.
Do yourself a favor and discover this provocative author.......2006-07-28
Clancy Sigal made me fall in love with his mother Jennie in his unsentimental memoir of a sometimes violent and crazy life. She's the mother I wish I had: passionate, irreverent, protective and smart. The pain and love Sigal feels for his mom hits you like a punch in the gut.
Dynamite scenes of young, street-tough Clancy's roller coaster life with his mysterious and powerful mother are punctuated by glimpses of his current relationship with his 10 year old son Joe. Together, they invoke the spirit of Jennie as they visit her grave, throw a baseball around or jog together, and she, in turn, surrounds them with her tough, maternal love. She lives again, through Sigal's gritty and ironic style.
Capone gangsters and cops-on-the-take are a normal part of the lives of this compelling mother-and-child team who, as they travel from city to city, often take false names. Always on the edge of the law, forever skipping out on landlords and creditors, they're a magnificent reminder of what it takes to stay alive in hard times: guts and guile.
This memoir led me to Sigal's other books: Going Away, Weekend in Dinlock, Zone of the Interior (re-released this year - an insanely brilliant semi-fictionalized account of his time with the famous/notorious `anti-psychiatrist' R.D. Laing) and The Secret Defector. Do yourself a favor and discover this provocative author - funny, authentic, political and deeply moving.
Sigal's Best .......2006-07-06
This is Clancy Sigal's best book. His work has always been autobiographical from his novel Going Away (the ultimate 'road' book for my generation of politically aware readers who shunned Kerouac 's egowanderings), to Weekend In Dinlock, his account of Yorkshire miners. In his latest, a memoir, Sigal gives us a funny, moving memory of his relationship with his mother - a fantastic character - set in Depression era America. It's an account of an education that is unsentimental and and profoundly moral. There isn't anything like it around. This is a real book of virtues.
A Great Dame and a Bad Boy and Chicago too.......2006-07-03
A terrific story well told. I don't know when I've ever read such a robust and intimate description of the tensions in a relationship between a strong sexy mother and a hormone-soaked adolescent boy. Although the background is exotic - Chicago in the turbulent shoot-first days when cops, criminals and union activists fought in the bloody streets - anyone who has ever dealt with an teenage boy will recognize the minefield of emotions Sigal reveals. Besides drawing a pungent likeness of a remarkable woman - his mother - he makes his own street gang life accessible to the reader when he talks about why he cherishes his lawbreaking friends from the old neighborhood. It's a vanished world today, and yet it's strikingly here and now. Good writing too - loose, easy and graceful. I'm a long-time fan of Clancy Sigal's memoirs-as-novels (GOING AWAY, ZONE OF THE INTERIOR). This is memoir that just happens to read like a novel.
Book Description
Bred and defined in the 1950S era of White greaser gangs, the Gaylords steadily grew in Chicago to become a gang to be reckoned with. By the early 1980s, Spanish immigration threatened not only their reign, but the very survival of many. Michael Scott was a member of the Gaylords through this turbulent time period, and has written a story based on actual advents, to offer all of us a ticket to take a suspenseful guided tour. The book not only gives the reader a roller coaster ride of traditional gang fights, but it also gives an historical account of what it took to walk the streets of Chicago as White youth in the 1970s and 1980s.
Customer Reviews:
Accurate & Sad.......2007-08-19
I never wrote a review before - probably never will again but like Duke said - this book brought back alot of memories of growing up just a little ahead of Rocker; right there. The book is good; maybe only if you lived there; maybe not. It's a book about what he did and what it was like in the neighborhood at that time. The names and places are accurate and pretty much the events and life hanging out is accurate. If you want know about it because you know the place or you want to understand what it was to be a teenager then and there - read the book. Not everyone was in a gang but I find it hard to believe you could have lived there and then and had your head so buried that you never saw any of this. I guess that's possible - but if you were 8-20 between 1970 - 1985 it would have been hard to miss - even if you got no closer than someone trying to recruit you.
All that said, for all the people that give it a one or two because you want to whine about typo's or bash the guys life or whine that it doesn't give a solution you should have read the cover before buying it. Rocker never claimed to solve anything; He claims, right on the cover to give, "a historical account of what it was like to walk the streets of Chicago (on the NW side) as a white youth in the 1970's & 1980's" and he delivers. Rocker is clearly not a professional author ... never claimed to be ... did the typo's changed the story? No. I agree there are definetly parts that drag and get repetative but, in a way, that just about sums up the life; in the end life dragged at times, it could be repetative but it was what it was. If that's what you want to know read the book. If you want a perfectly editted romance novel with a happy ending, read Mary Higgins Clark
Try again.......2007-08-12
I live in Chicago and know these places, and it was fun knowing where he was talking about I over all thought the book was lacking. It may tell how he thought things were at the time but all I could think about was how this book just sounded like he was trying to justify everything. Justify the violence, the crime, and most importantly trying to justify being in a racist gang. He not only tries to justify it but there are undertones he wants you to feel the same way he does and he fails poorly. Its not the worst book I've read but I won't advise you to read it. What can you expect, after the success of Reymundo Sanchez's books the flood of crap books to fill this niche in ex gang members lives is to be expected.
Low life piece of human waste.......2007-08-12
MIchael Scott is not the name the 'author' went by in the 1980's. It was Michael Polk, and I arrested him on many occasions. I have not read this book, and I have no intention of reading it . In the 1980's, I was a Chicago Police Officer assigned to the Gang Crime North unit. Polk, and the slime he ran with, were nothing more than a group of racist animals who were determined to do harm to the Hispanic people that were moving into the area. Of course, they also found time to battle the Simon City Royals, another white gang who were the Gaylords' rivals. The real heroes are the people who refused to be intimidated by this trash, and remained in their changing neighborhoods, in the hope that they would provide a stabilizing influence. Please,folks, do not buy this book. Take the money you would spend on it, and give it to charity, or better still, the families of violent crime victims. And please, resist the urge to glorify these creeps. If you have ever seen a twelve or thirteen year-old kid with his brains splashed all over the street, for absolutely no reason, you would better understand my frame of reference. After a while, you get tired of picking up the bodies.
Disappointed.......2007-05-12
As a NW side Chicago girl I was excited to read this book. What a waste of my time and money. I still have not finished it, but I know this is a book going nowhere. The book is terribly repetitive, poorly written and glorifies low level street violence. Yes, its tough being the white kids in an urban landscape, but have you learned anything? What is obvious is the writter is still glamorizing the old days. I can imagine him, PBR or Old Mil in hand waxing prophetic about his days as a white gang-banger. I like to be a solution to a problem, not contribute to it.
My life reading this book.......2007-04-04
Boring. I guess in the world of gang activity that's a good thing. How many times can you get into fist fights and smash things? I guess you had to be there.
Average customer rating:
- Selling Russians McBelieve
- Entertaining memoir
- Interesting and Entertaining
- it is an inspiring book. great determination
- Press On---Cohon brings McDonalds to Russia
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To Russia With Fries: My Journey from Chicago's South Side to Moscow's Red Square - Having Fun Along the Way
George Cohon , and
David Macfarlane
Manufacturer: McClelland & Stewart
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
| Biographies & Memoirs
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Business
| Professionals & Academics
| Biographies & Memoirs
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Strategy & Competition
| Management & Leadership
| Business & Investing
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General
| Business & Investing
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Russia
| History
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ASIN: 0771021984
Release Date: 1999-04-01 |
Book Description
You might think that an autobiography by the senior chairman of McDonald’s in Canada and Russia would be a modestly boastful, ho-hum business story of expansion and board-room debates, wrapped in some nice reminiscences about his family. You would be very wrong. Because this is George Cohon’s autobiography, and George Cohon (“Call me George, please!”) is not an ordinary man…not in his approach to business and not in his approach to telling his life story.
It’s true that George Cohon is one of the most successful businessmen of his generation and that he’s also one of the most colourful. But the man you’ll meet in the pages of To Russia With Fries is considerably more complex than that description suggests. Here, you’ll encounter a man who not only dreamed the impossible dream of opening a McDonald’s restaurant in the heart of the Soviet Union (of all places), but had the patience, the persistence, and above all the good humour to navigate the maze of obstacles set in his course by a scornful communist bureaucracy. You’ll meet a man whose heart is bigger than his assets (he’s donating all the royalties from this book to charity); a man with a serious sense of fun, who loves (and is frequently on the receiving end of) practical jokes; a man whose life so far has been extraordinary by any standard. You’ll discover a man who is a natural and creative entrepreneur and an acknowledged expert on starting a business in Russia. He’s been there and done that – long before the crash of the Iron Curtain.
From a man who can think and do six things at once (he’s been told he has a mind like a butterfly), comes a very lively and hugely entertaining story that has universal appeal.
Customer Reviews:
Selling Russians McBelieve.......2005-10-28
A fascinating story of the authors life, concentrating on his efforts trying to sell the concept of fast food to party apparachiks who had almost little idea what a hamburger was and acted as if they cared less. The book is full of the many humerous and incongruous situations that confronted the western businessman in both Soviet and post Soviet Russia, for that reason alone I would recommend the book.
Having said this I found many irritations too in the sections of the book dealing with activities outside Russia. There are a number of self congratulatory stories, where uninformed critics of multinational fast food are roundly dispatched. Meanwhile meaningful discussion of ironies such as corporate fast food super sizing kids and then building them Hospitals is conspicuous by its absence. Whether in this instance, blocking investment that helped black South Africans or raising money for Israel the book at times seems to be all about self righteous application of economic power. The author trained as a lawyer and naturally argues a good defence, but in criticism I found some of this irkesome.
Entertaining memoir .......2005-07-22
George Cohon describes how he turned McDonald's into a Russian institution by marketing meat, bread, potatoes and milk in a culture where such fare had long constituted the traditional diet. The lesson here is that when global companies market products that local consumers can readily identify with, the companies are perceived to be of local origin.
Interesting and Entertaining.......2000-05-03
Although there is a bit of name dropping and a few self congratulatory stories, overall this book is entertaining and worth reading. Mr. Cohon, while summarizing business dealings which define perseverance, provides interesting perspectives on business management, networking and family values. He also provides a lot of information about the inner political workings of the former Soviet Union.
it is an inspiring book. great determination.......1998-10-03
just great!! amazing.
Press On---Cohon brings McDonalds to Russia.......1998-06-16
George Cohon gives an honest account of the years of meetings, negotiations, disapointments and eventual victory associated with bringing McDonalds to Russia.
A testament to the human side of successful business negotiation.
Book Description
Carol Vesperman Truncale was born in Chicago, Illinois. She was raised in the Lakeview neighborhood on the north side of the city. At an early age, she developed scoliosis. The treatment she received greatly influenced her life. Carol is a nurse at The Cradle Adoption Agency in Evanston, Illinois.
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