Randall shares his Life Lessons
Insightful and entertaining page turner
Maura Curley
Life Lessons by Alexander Randall V
Outskirts Press 2010
340 pages
$15.95 outskirtspress.com/life-lessons
The problem with many “memoirs” is that they get bogged down in the writer’s too personal rapture, and often leave the reader cold.
Fortunately Alex Randall’s self-published missive called “Life Lessons from Louie Motherball, Margaret Mead, and the Good News Guy" has plenty of engaging anecdotes, eccentricities and insights to keep you turning the pages.
Author Alex Randall may not be household name outside of the Virgin Islands, where he lives, and works as a professor of communication at the University of the Virgin Islands and is known on radio as “the good news guy." But his persona relationships with well-known people like his mentor Margaret Mead, combined with plenty of name dropping offer universal appeal.
Add to this his undeniable zest for pursuing imaginative initiatives and making fire from sticks. There are lessons to be learned.
Randall’s romp through life, includes his zany days at Princeton and Columbia Universities in the 1970s, where he earned advanced degrees, early entrepreneurial escapades promoting concerts, selling tee shirts and “little bustards” and to his wildly successful founding of the Boston Computer Exchange during the 1980s. Then there to speaking and teaching tours around the world, lots of life, death, rejuvenation and finally a bit of grounding in the Virgin Islands, as he approaches his sixth decade on his family compound on Water Island, a stone’s throw from St. Thomas.
The son of two doctors, Randall comes from good stock. He is number five in a lineage of Alexander Randalls, dating back to Alexander the first, who was elected Maryland’s attorney general in 1864 and later was president of Farmer’s National Bank in Annapolis. Alexander II died as a child, but Alexanders III and IV were prominent doctors.
Aleander V is an adept story teller, with a sufficient balance of self-deprecating humor, brashness, arrogance, idealism and awe to give his story traction.
Randall also ups the ante by punctuating his prose with “life lessons” – a few pithy sentences in each chapter which illustrate what he learned from different experiences. Some offer basic empowerment like “Never let a jerk tell you that you can’t – show ‘em you can” to the more practical “Never assume that the elephant who wants to work with you won’t sit on you.”
Randall says he wrote the book because along the way he has learned a lot in spite of an excellent school education, and most of what the learned didn’t come from books or classrooms. He says, “I figured out how to live, so some of this might be valuable to you.”
The book is unconventional with a few chapters focusing on his family genealogy, favorite teachers sometimes in their voice. A few more chapters deal with Randall’s cars, his home construction, favorite recipes - mundane things that often take up much of our time. Randall extracts lessons beneath their layers.
In the preface Randall writes, “ My life is a series of disasters punctuated with miracles. It’s all about near misses and direct hits, sharp turns, sudden stops, change of direction and jumping off a cliff without knowing where I’d land."
Perhaps the best lesson learned from this book is that the journey really is the destination.
Maura Curley is publisher of virginvoices.com
Maura Curley is publisher of virginvoices.com
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Click Here to Add a Comment"I like the quote about life being a series of disasters punctuated with miracles! A new way of looking at some of the good and bad!" - Benjamin (2011-01-27)