Just before he died of cancer in April, Walton, the iconoclastic founder of Wal-Mart, set down the story of his life with the help of FORTUNE senior editor Huey. It is a folksy tale of an American dream come true.
With a fervor that would make Horatio Alger proud, Walton recaps his overalls-to-riches life, from his humble birth in Oklahoma in 1918 through his first entrepreneurial effort as a five-and-dime store owner to his ascent to CEO of the world's largest retailer. Interspersing plain talk with testimonials from family, friends and colleagues, Walton sketches a detailed portrait of a back-to-basics family man who, despite his wealth, drives a pickup truck, wears $89 suits and pays $5 for a haircut. Walton writes: "I just don't believe a big showy lifestyle is appropriate for anywhere, least of all here in Bentonville [Ark.], where folks work hard for their money and where we all know that everyone puts on their trousers one leg at a time."
Throughout the book, Walton preaches his gospel: Work hard, keep costs down, make your employees your partners and always satisfy your customers. At times, his down-home tome is in danger of sounding clichéd—particularly when Walton lays out such commonsense strategies as commit to your business, communicate and swim upstream. Still, there's no denying that the Walton way works. Just ask any Wal-Mart shareholder who bought stock when the company went public in 1970: A $1,650 investment would now be worth about $3 million. (Doubleday, $22.50)
by Mary McCarthy
This slim account of la vie de bohème in 1930s New York City is prefaced by literary critic Elizabeth Hard-wick's affectionate recollections of the literary luminary: "What often seemed to be at stake in Mary's writing and in her way of looking at things was a somewhat obsessional concern for the integrity of sheer fact....If one would sometimes take the liberty of suggesting caution to her, advising prudence or mere practicality, she would look puzzled and answer: But it's the truth."
Regrettably, Hardwick's foreword is more incisive and revealing than Intellectual Memoirs. The book does have illuminating moments, notably, a no-nonsense assessment of the Communist Party, while furnishing a sharp whiff of life among the burgeoning (leftist) literary elite. But too often, McCarthy's memoirs seem like a combination of Remembrance of Flings Past (she catalogs her lovers and the size of their sexual equipment) and a parody of a grad student's diary: "We all swam naked and argued about Henry James...." (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $15.95)
by Annie Dillard
For all its epic sweep, generations of characters and beautiful writing, this debut novel from the acclaimed author of An American Childhood still feels like homework. A story of the settling of Washington State's Puget Sound at the end of the 19th century, it follows the intertwined lives of the "Bostons"—as the Native Americans of the region called any interlopers from the East—and the several Indian tribes that had long been fishing and logging in those parts. Part generational novel, part history text, The Living is like an early Twin Peaks—minus the weirdness.
And that, in a way, is its problem. The 397-page volume introduces readers to dozens of characters through more than 50 years, and yet we never really get inside one. Clare Fishburn, for example, grows from infancy to middle age: We see his marriage, his fatherhood, his metamorphosis into wealthy landowner and his odd relationship with the most David Lynchian character in Whatcom, the town eccentric Beal Obenchain. But he never quite comes to life; it's as if, in her studied use of language, the author has forgotten idiosyncratic humanity.
Still, Dillard has a poet's way with an aphorism, as in, "He spoke without emphasis and softly, pulling his words, as if his tongue were not a muscle but a petal." She also must have carefully researched the cadences of the time: apparently "to be abreast of what's afoot" was then a common expression.
Much of the writing is so graceful, it can carry the reader along for hundreds of pages; maybe only some will notice the lack of heart underneath. A renowned essayist, Dillard is a pro at constructing language that educates, elucidates and charms. Maybe next time she will create characters who do the same. (HarperCollins, $22.50)
by Robert B. Parker
Parker's 18th Spenser mystery finds the author at the middle of his form. With his sleek and sullen cohort, Hawk, the detective goes to the heart of the inner city to solve the brutal and seemingly random murder of a teenager and her infant daughter. Parker actually manages to provide broad social insights during those long stakeout hours, as well as specific social developments: Spenser moves in with the ever tedious Susan Silverman, and Hawk falls (sort of) in love. (Putnam, $19.95)
by Avery Carman
Fame! Concert stardom, magazine cover appearances, guest shots on The Tonight Show, intimate chats with Princess Di, Bruce Springsteen. Michael Jackson, Cher! It all happens to Paul Brock, narrator of this labored comic novel.
Well, not all; the celebrity chats are imagined. But the rest is real, and Avery Corman (Kramer vs. Kramer and Oh, God!) explores with relish the hype upon which his hero's sudden fame is built.
Brock is a television writer known to producers as a "quality guy" (he turns down sitcoms about teenagers and girl-stalked-by-killer movies), and he's writing The Novel on the side. That book, Upward Mobility, is serious stuff, concerning "a New York couple who meet in the 1960s and, while dating, go through a period of social protest." Recognizing the limited appeal of this subject, Mel Steiner, a childhood friend, now a promotion-minded music-biz tycoon, takes over.
Brock's songwriting and singing talents are nothing special, but the savvy Mel packages him as "America's Balladeer of the Middle Class," arranges a Radio City Music' Hall debut and transforms him into a major concert star. Soon, almost everything that can happen to famous people happens to Paul Brock, including being kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists ("Give up of lands from Israel!... You famous American Person. You in USA Today."). The bemused novelist goes along with it all, rejecting only a proposal for "Brock. A man's cologne for thinking men." Upward Mobility, naturally, becomes a best-seller.
Does all this synthetic glory bring truly satisfying rewards? Will the quality guy surrender totally to the bitch goddess Success? The answers come, but they are as slick and unsurprising as the questions.
Corman doesn't expect us to believe this story, any more than he expects us to believe Brock's exchanges with the celebrities who phone or drop by. But there are far too many of these cameo fantasies, and they lack bite.
Lack of bite, in fact, is what's wrong with The Big Hype. The pollution of our culture by hype is a sitting-duck target, and Corman lays on satire with a backhoe, rather than a palette knife. Dustin Hoffman and George Burns made hits of the film versions of Kramer vs. Kramer and Oh, God! If Hoffman and Burns will play Brock and Steiner, The Big Hype may make it as a film. As a novel, it has problems actors can't solve. (Simon & Schuster, $19)
by Paid Theroux
Paul Theroux is not so much a travel writer as a diarist on the move. As he demonstrated in such books as The Iron Rooster, an account of a railway journey across China, he is concerned not just with creating absorbing word pictures—which he does surpassingly well—but also with the minutiae of social behavior, culinary traditions and political mores. In what is probably his most ambitious peregrination yet, he crisscrosses a Pacific triangle defined roughly by Australia in the west, Hawaii in the north and Easter Island in the east. Theroux wanders sometimes on foot—through New Zealand's Fiordland, for instance, "one of the world's last real wildernesses"—but as often as possible by collapsible kayak. In it he paddles his way to a Crusoe-like sojourn on the desert is land of Pau, skims past blowholes at the foot of Easter Island cliffs and frolics with dolphins off Kaua'i's Na Pali coast.
But though Theroux revels in slicing through lonely lagoons and sleeping on isolated beaches, he can't resist exercising his talent for distilling the essence of a place through its human denizens and their quaint, sometimes off-putting ways. In Oceania he scrutinizes the high and the (literally) mighty, like the voluminous King of Tonga ("a sort of Pacific island version of Jabba the Hutt from The Empire Strikes Back"), and such humbler mortals as Tonganese Enna, who proposes to him while gathering sea slugs. And being querulous as well as questing, Theroux finds an underside to the Pacific paradise manifest in the growing economic dominion of Japan, the cynical tyranny of French nuclear testing, and the near ubiquity of Spam. Nevertheless, the cumulative impression of experiencing Oceania through Theroux's penetrating gaze is exhilarating, sometimes, as he himself puts it, "joyous." (Putnam, $24.95)
- Contributors:
- Jill Rachlin,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Sara Nelson,
- Susan Toepfer,
- Jeff Brown,
- Ben Harte.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
