It is clear from the first page of Leonard Roberts’s LEADING WITH VISION AND HEART that this is less a work of history than hagiography. “As you read my memoir,” begins the book’s second paragraph, “you will learn how a boy from the west side of Chicago married the teenage love of his life at 18 and then went on to become a world-acclaimed food scientist at the age of 19.” That boy was Leonard Roberts, who would go on to do a number of heroic things, including fight corruption, stand up to racism, and lead turnarounds at three Fortune 500 companies: Arby’s, Shoney’s, and RadioShack. His career is the centerpiece of the book, though he also tells the stories of his parents meeting, marrying, and settling in Chicago, as well as his own boyhood and college years. These passages are pleasant and entertaining, brimming with slice-of-life details such as twenty-five-cent haircuts and his mother’s favorite singer (Connie Francis). However, there is tragedy as well: his daughter Dawn being critically wounded by a drunk driver, for instance.
The hagiography is taken to another level over the last 300 or so pages, which contain a lot of photos (actually, the whole book is laden with them), Roberts’s speeches and keynote addresses, and magazine covers featuring his business acumen. There are also nearly a dozen This Is Your Life-style snippets—written not by Roberts but by his daughters, sons-in-law, siblings, grandchildren, former co-workers, and others. The effect is that of a scrapbook, rather than a memoir. Roberts himself writes in a laid-back, can-we-talk style, with plenty of exclamation points (three sentences in a row, at one juncture). Yet there is a curious lack of depth in places. At one point, for instance, he mentions a Black family in his neighborhood whose house was burned down. “At a very early age,” he writes,” I realized that something was very wrong with our society.” However, he doesn’t build on this observation. Even his ordeal with Ray Danner, racist founder of Shoney’s, which should be one of the book’s highlights, doesn’t seem especially gripping. Instead it reads more like a summary of events.
Readers looking for a mostly-upbeat story of one man’s achievements will be satisfied with LEADING WITH VISION AND HEART. Those who want something more visceral may need to keep looking.
Business mogul Leonard Roberts’s LEADING WITH VISION AND HEART is a compelling memoir in places, but it fails to dig deep where it matters.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader