|
Swimming Across: A Memoir (精装)
by Andrew S. Grove
| Category:
Business, American Dream, Immigration success, Memoir |
| Market price: ¥ 268.00
MSL price:
¥ 118.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Profoundly educational and enlightening, Andy Grove's book shares in this book his early life experiences that shaped his destiny. The challenge to start from below ground level and rise to the very top proves that anyone who does not have the resources to succeed can learn to leverage themselves to achieve goals that benefit everyone. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
|
| |
AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 11 items |
|
|
Tom Brokaw (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
Haunting and inspirational. It should be required reading in schools. |
|
|
Henry Kissinger (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
A poignant memoir...a moving reminder of the meaning of America... |
|
|
George Soros (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
This honest and riveting account gives a fascinating insight into the man who wrote Only the Paranoid Survive. |
|
|
Time (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
...an astringently unsentimental memoir that may find its place...with such works as Angela's Ashes...and This Boy's Life... |
|
|
David Rouse (Booklist, MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
Grove, who, as one of the cofounders of Intel and CEO for 11 years, was responsible for turning the company into the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer. He is also the author of Only the Paranoid Survive (1996), a well-written collection of illuminating insights into management. Also, Grove was named "Man of the Year" by Time magazine for 1997. None of these things matter, though, in this moving and inspiring memoir, which is really the story of Andras Grof, a young Hungarian boy who barely survived scarlet fever, hid from Nazis in the Budapest basement of a sympathetic Christian family, suffered anti-Semitic taunts as a youth, fled his homeland as Soviet tanks advanced during the Hungarian uprising of 1956, and sailed off alone at the age of 20 to the U.S. - where Grove's narrative ends as he starts school in New York and begins to make his way in a new country. Grove's account of life in Hungary in the 1950s is a vivid picture of a tumultuous period in world history.
|
|
|
Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
"Jesus Christ was killed by the Jews, and because of that, all of the Jews will be thrown into the Danube," says a playmate to four-year-old Andris Grof Grove's original name. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in 1936, Grove, chairman of Intel, grew up in Budapest during his country's most tempestuous era. Despite avoiding deportation and death, Grove's family lived in fear during Nazi occupation and lost some rights and property. Afterwards, they lived under Soviet control. Curiously, Grove's memoir charts the routinized mundanities of his teen years seeing his teacher at the opera, being afraid to meet young women at the local public pool, the success of a short story he wrote more than life in war-torn Europe. But his discussion of contemporary politics is astute and personal "I had mixed feelings about the Communists... they had saved my mother's life and my own.... On the other hand... they increasingly interfered with our daily life." Never didactic, he remains focused on his own intellectual growth. Grove continued his education in New York after the 1956 revolution failed. The intelligence, dedication and ingenuity that earned him fame and fortune (he was Time's Man of the Year in 1997) are evident early on. He deftly balances humor e.g., subversive anti-Communist jokes from Hungary with insight into overcoming endless obstacles (from hostile foreign invasions to New York's City University system). Though lacking in drama, Grove's story stands smartly amid inspirational literature by self-made Americans. |
|
|
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
I loved this clear, accessible memoir about a boy (and later young man) who grows up in Hungary during the WWII and Revolution years, escapes to the West and comes to the United States to start a new life. I'm biased because my father is from Hungary and is of the exact same generation; he even had experiences similar to Mr. Grove's, going to preparatory high school, university, getting caught up in the Hungarian Revolution and escaping in the middle of the night to Austria. How wonderful to have some of the history and experiences of the times described in such an accessible way. The story is clear and straightforward and yet extremely moving, almost haunting. I loved how the title becomes clear when you read the book (an allusion to swimming across the lake of life and how not everyone makes it to the other side). How glad I am that Mr. Grove made it (across the Atlantic, at any rate) and wrote such a lovely book. It means a lot to at least one daughter of a Hungarian immigrant. |
|
|
Nicholas J. Csorba (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
The Book is easy to read and understand and gives you the sense that, today, you learned a fine lesson in growing up in self fullfillment and what it takes. The book is a story of success against a turmoil filled landscape. It is clearly a reaching out story, to young and old, in history, self-achievement, and good people. We are a much too distracted people today to follow through as this author had. Alot to learn, should you be able to apply oneself to the lesson. Bravo to this hungarian man and writer. I have always searched for this book, being Hungarian and appreciative of excellent historical and biographical stories. |
|
|
Cathy Goodwin (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
Andrew Grove was a founder of Intel Corporation and is the company's CEO today. His memoir tells the story of his childhood and early college years in Hungary. Grove survived World War II and emigrated to the United States following the Revolution.
Andrew's parents seem remarkably strong. His family enjoyed a comfortable life as owners of a dairy business. His father survived, improbably, a stint in a prison camp during World War II and later saw the business dissolve into state ownership. His mother's spirit kept him alive during the War.
Both parents worked hard but gave Andrew what we would call "quality time." Even when money was tight, he had English and music lessons.
After reading so many stories of growing-up-in-wartime-Europe, I was surprised to find myself drawn into the story. I wanted to keep reading and actually wish the book had continued into Andrew's early years.
What works is Grove's straightforward, matter-of-fact style. He conveys a sense of, "I did what had to be done," with no time wasted on emotional fallout. As a result, his story can seem cold.
For instance, when escaping from the Austrian countryside to Vienna, Grove and his boyhood friend decide to leave early to avoid "procedures" of the local gendarmes. They do not awaken the two girls who traveled with them from Hungary, and these girls are never mentioned again. Indeed, the only women Grove mentions are his mother, his occasional dates and - in two sentences - his wife and daughters.
Apart from the compelling narrative, Grove's book shows how qualities of a future CEO emerge in childhood. Grove continually sought to learn and grow. At one point he even signed up for singing lessons. He had a clear sense of what he wanted and seemed to take for granted his success in school, particularly his talent for chemistry. Ironically, surviving in a Communist society turned out to be excellent preparation for capitalist corporate life. Both, for example, punish those who speak too freely.
Grove's teachers predicted his success. The book's title comes from a teacher's prediction that Grove would "swim across" the river out of Hungary to success. Grove did swim across, and eventually he was able to fly. |
|
|
Knowledge@Wharton (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-14 00:00>
Intel Chairman Andrew Grove Reminds Us of Our Roots.
It is a rare book by a corporate CEO that isn't either a trumpet blasting his visionary insight and strategic brilliance or a dramatic and mawkish retelling of his climb to the top from unimaginably humble origins. Swimming Across: A Memoir - Andrew Grove's simple, elegant recounting of the first 20 years of his life - is that rare exception.
Grove, one of the founders of Intel and still its chairman, was born Andras Grof in Hungary in 1936, the only child of parents who were in the dairy business. We tend to forget that prior to 1945 there was no Iron Curtain, and countries we think of now as post-Communist had vital histories of their own before the Soviet Union stitched together its empire following World War II.
Grove recounts a happy childhood in Budapest, the country's largest and most cosmopolitan city. The specter of war loomed large in Europe in the late 1930s, but Grove was too young to be aware of its darker aspects. His family was Jewish and even as a young child he knew that many Jews were forced to live separately in ghettos. But to the young Grove and his playmates, this reality was simply material for another schoolyard game, much to the horror of their kindergarten teacher.
Grove's early years, before the full force of the war descended upon Europe, were comfortably middle class. Budapest was actually two distinct communities, the wealthier Buda on one side of the Danube River and the more commercial Pest on the other side. Grove's family moved to Pest in 1938 when his father expanded the dairy business.
In 1942, Grove's father was drafted into the Hungarian army. He and other Jewish conscripts were sent to the Russian front not as regular soldiers, but rather as part of a support team sent ahead to clear roadways and build camps, fortifications and other facilities. In 1943, Grove and his mother learned that his father "had disappeared at the front." The Hungarian army was unable to provide the family with any additional information regarding his father for the balance of the war. While his mother never gave up hope, Grove, who had been six at the time of the draft, had a more difficult time holding onto memories of his absent parent.
In one of the book's most moving moments, Grove tells us of the doorbell ringing in their apartment one day in the fall of 1945. His mother opened the door and found "an emaciated man, filthy and in a ragged soldier's uniform standing at the open door." As his mother embraced the man, Grove thought, "this must be my father."
Scenes like this, however poignant, are the book's chief disappointment. The writing is bland and devoid of emotion. Grove describes everyday life in the middle of a war zone and under the tightening noose of communism and even tells of his mother's rape by Russian soldiers, but all in prose that is more redolent of a corporate brief than an evocative memoir.
The meatiest part of the book can be found in Grove's recounting of life in Hungary in the middle 1950s. We see a country that was being slowly strangled by the politburo in Moscow. In 1956, Grove, who had found his passion for chemistry, was looking forward to starting his second year at the university. He was already part of a small class of individuals destined for leadership within Hungary. But in October 1956, Russian troops and tanks rolled into Budapest and clamped down on what had been an incipient, but weak, effort to throw off the Soviet chains.
We can imagine the agony Grove felt at watching his country being overrun by soldiers intent on enforcing a police state. He knew that many of his friends were in fact fleeing Hungary; Grove's parents urged him to get out before the borders were sealed. He and two friends made the difficult decision to leave, undertaking a journey to Austria and eventually to America that is the stuff of movies.
Grove found his way to this country through the combined efforts of numerous relief and charitable organizations. Relatives in New York City took him in and helped him adapt to his new life. Grove entered City College of New York and graduated in 1960 with an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering followed in 1963 by a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. The rest, as they say, is history. Grove ends this memoir with his move to California.
In an interview in Esquire magazine in 2000, Grove spoke about his life as an immigrant in this country. In an era when many would have the U.S. close its borders and eject every "foreigner," Grove's presence and success is a reminder that the U.S. has been the place for those seeking a better life for almost 400 years. "It is a very important truism that immigrants and immigration are what made America what it is," Grove writes. "We must be vigilant as a nation to have a tolerance for differences, a tolerance for new people."... |
|
|
|
1 2 | Total 2 pages 11 items |
|
|
|
|
|
|
