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Alumni Spotlight A banker, a short-story writer, and Harvard hoopsters Banker to the World William R. Rhodes ’53 McGraw-Hill, $25 “My mission has always been to build,” writes William R. Rhodes in Banker to the World. Other lessons from Citi’s former senior vice chairman and chairman emeritus of the NMH Board of Trustees: lead boldly and decisively; take prompt, comprehensive action; seize your opportunities; defy intimidation; and stand up for what is right. Part instruction manual and part autobiography, Banker to the World offers a glimpse of Rhodes’s long career of navigating highstakes financial negotiations—with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, with Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, and with Venezuelan president Andrés Pérez, for example. The financial crises depicted in the book are gripping, with Rhodes proving to be the essential linchpin in many negotiations. He warned the U.S. government of an Asian building bubble in the mid-1990s; helped Uruguay, nearing financial collapse, secure a $2.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund; and catalyzed critical opposition to a sovereign bankruptcy proposal by the IMF. Time and time again, Rhodes steered various political and financial factions to successful agreements. Each chapter of Banker to the World ends with a small summary—a moral of sorts. “Remember that failing to act is the same as acting and failing,” Rhodes writes in one such conclusion. “Success cannot come without trying.” He repeatedly stresses that although each financial negotiation in which he has participated is unique, the lessons he has learned serve as a comprehensive roadmap for the future. “Like the ancient Maya, who conceived of time as a series of cycles, we would do well to link the cycles of the present to those of both the past and the future,” Rhodes writes. “The lessons derived from experience … are relevant not just for the fleeting moments in which they originated, but also for what is to come.”
A Friendly Life S. Prestley Blake ’34 with Alan Farnham Brigantine Media, $15 Pres Blake, co-founder of Friendly Ice Cream Corp., is one of the kings of the ice cream parlor, so it’s no surprise that his autobiography is as short and sweet as his famous treats. The book’s opening pages depict a retired Blake standing up in a 2001 shareholders’ meeting and demanding accountability from the company’s CEO for letting Friendly’s debt rise while stock prices and employee morale plummet. “I guess you can see
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I’m stubborn,” Blake admits later in the book. He describes how the business started in 1935 during the Depression: Blake and his brother, Curtis, received backing from their parents, bought their first chairs for $8 from a second-hand store, and kept their records on the pieces of cardboard from laundered men’s shirts. Over the years, they honed a business model for what would become a restaurant operation with more than 500 locations. (Northfield Mount Hermon garners a mention in a chapter on Blake’s philanthropy efforts.) A Friendly Life is enjoyable and highly readable, with Blake conveying both the excitement and worries that come with building a successful business. He may be stubborn, but what shines through is his self-deprecating charm.
At-Risk: Stories by Amina Gautier Amina Gautier ’95 The University of Georgia Press, $24.95 A private-school student on a scholarship, brothers dealing with their father’s abrupt departure, a young, aspiring gang member— the characters in Amina Gautier’s short stories hover between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, black and white, haves and have-nots. In this collection, which won the 2010 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Gautier probes the sense of uncertainty in these children and teenagers, whose circumstances place them in the broad “at-risk” category of the title. Gautier deftly paints her subjects with nuance and detail. In “Dance for Me,” the narrator is caught between the rough neighborhood where she lives and the WASP culture of her schoolmates. After kissing first a black drug dealer and then an affluent white student, the narrator muses that “they were both from the real world, their own distinct ones, but I was somewhere in limbo. Set apart, I didn’t know how to let either of them in.” Gautier, however, knows exactly how to let both her characters and her readers in.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors in Presidential Impeachment H. Lowell Brown ’65 Palgrave Macmillan, $90 Even the nation’s top politician can be threatened with removal from office, as impeachment proceedings against presidents William Jefferson Clinton, Richard M. Nixon, and Andrew Jackson have demonstrated. Among the offenses: treason, bribery, or “other high crimes and misdemeanors.”