Howard Schultz, the longtime CEO of Starbucks, will soon publish “From the Ground Up” (Random House, 352 pages, $28). The book, he writes, is “a story about reinvention and renewal. About possibilities. About the power of people to change the lives of others as well as their own. It's a story about what we can do for ourselves and for each other, as well as the responsibility we all have to reimagine our shared future.” In other words, he's running for president.
“From the Ground Up” bounces between the author's early years—he was the son of poor Jews in Brooklyn—and his experiences as an entrepreneur and philanthropist. Mr. Schultz's recollections of youth would have made a fine memoir on their own. The image of Howard's father thrashing the young man in the shower for cursing his mother, or of his mother wailing that “the shylocks are going to come for your father” because he couldn't repay $5,000 he'd borrowed to pay for a bar-mitzvah party, are not easily forgotten.
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