by Ray Kroc, with Robert Anderson (1977)
Few entrepreneurs can claim to have actually changed the way we live, but Ray Kroc is one of them. His revolutions in food service automation, franchising, shared national training and advertising have earned him a place beside the men who founded not merely businesses but entire new industries. But even more interesting than Ray Kroc the business legend is Ray Kroc the man. Not your typical self-made tycoon, Kroc was 52 when he met the McDonald brothers and opened his first franchise. Now meet Ray Kroc, the man behind the business legend, in his own words. Irrepressible enthusiast, perceptive people-watcher, and born storyteller, he will fascinate and inspire you. You'll never forget Ray Kroc.
John F. Love
McDonald's is the story of an American business success, a company that proved the value of hard work, ingenuity, trial and error, and gut instincts. In McDonald's: Behind the Arches, business writer John F. Love tells the astonishing story of the people and the strategies, the innovation and the brilliance that turned a single hamburger stand into a multibillion-dollar corporation that has influenced the very culture of America - and now the world.
Peter Ackroyd
Within his lifetime T.S. Eliot came to be considered the greatest poet of his generation and perhaps the most important poet of this century. Two decades after his death, his reputation, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, remains as secure as ever. His influence has been profound: virtually every poet writing in English in the last fifty years owes a debt to him. Eliot achieved great success during his life. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was an influential magazine and book editor, he spoke widely on religion and social issues. But he was also a very private man who remained something of a mystery even to his closest friends. This is only one of a number of paradoxes in Eliot's life. Perhaps chief among them, as this biography demonstrates, was Eliot's insistence on the impersonality of great poetry while at the same time his own work was suffused with his experience and personality. In fact, as Peter Ackroyd points out, "His private choices and obsessions became emblematic of, and in some sense determined our understanding of, the twentieth-century tradition." Eliot insisted on the importance of literary tradition, yet he had no real predecessors or successors. Along with Pound, Joyce, and Woolf, he helped give birth to modernism in literature, but then later in his career he abandoned it. From this biography -- the first authoritative, comprehensive life of Eliot ever published -- we can at last understand the relationship of Eliot's life and work, the better to appreciate his artistic achievement. With this book we now have the first detailed account of Eliot's deeply troubled first marriage, as well as reliable descriptions of the solitude and misery of his middle years and the fulfillment and joy he found late in life in his second marriage. Scrupulously researched, elegantly written and insightful, T.S. Eliot is an accomplished portrait of an extraordinary figure. It will be an essential book for anyone who wants to understand one of the most important writers of the century. - Back cover.
James L. Turk and Charis Wahl
"When Jack Layton died unexpectedly in the summer of 2011, millions of people mourned the loss of a man who had emerged as a much-loved political leader. They saw him as someone who combined values they shared with a personal style they admired. In this book, co-editors James L. Turk and Charis Wahl have gathered stories and anecdotes about Jack Layton from a wide range of people who knew him at different stages during his life and career. These contributions offer an engaging and informal biographical portrait of Jack as a young man in Hudson, Quebec, as a lecturer at Ryerson University, as a Toronto city councillor, and as the leader of the NDP. The contributors include family and friends, colleagues, politicians, and constituents. Among them are Ed Broadbent, Sarah Layton, Svend Robinson, Tim Flannery, Peggy Nash, Jean Charest, Brian Topp, Cathy Crowe, Libby Davies, Joe Mihevc, Brad Lavigne, Anne McGrath, Shawn Atleo, and Adam Vaughan."--Publisher.
Danny Peary
Interviews, essays, personal remembrances, tributes, and photographs explore the characters, roles, and styles of more than one hundred film greats.