Rediscovering American Values

A compassionate celebration of such traditional ideals as fairness, honesty, humility, service, and leadership shows them to be alive and well and explains how they can be incorporated into one's personal and professional life. 40,000 first printing. Tour.

A successful executive's principled, persuasive pitch for the notion that freedom is anchored in cardinal virtues of the sort that helped make the US a leader among nations. The president of Amway Corp. (a closely held Michigan-based multinational whose annual revenues top $6 billion), DeVos gets down to business immediately, defining liberty as the ability to do what one wants, so long as it's the right thing to do. Dividing his anecdotal text into three parts, he first cites such values as compassion, fairness, honesty, humility, moral courage, self- discipline, and thoughtfulness as laudable means to the desirable end of upholding freedom. In a second section addressing self- reliance, or the frequently difficult job of becoming free, the author commends complementary qualities, in particular, accountability, commitment, cooperation, initiative, perseverance, and stewardship. For his concluding chapters on preserving freedom, he considers broader-gauge attributes, including brotherhood, charity, education, forgiveness, leadership, and service. An unabashed supporter of Judeo-Christian ethics and the golden rule, DeVos is at pains to ensure that readers do not confuse his concept of liberty with license. In his book, freedom involves real responsibilities to one's family, community, country, and fellow human beings. Nor does he engage in extended tirades against government, noting only that ``human dignity is better preserved when we restrain ourselves rather than when we have restraints imposed upon us by laws and law enforcement agencies.'' By no coincidence, moreover, the vignettes he employs to illustrate his points attest to the efficacy of individual and grass-roots action. Perhaps best of all, the author manages the near-impossible task of extolling rectitude without lapsing into self-righteousness. A down-to-earth paean to simple goodness (with a foreword by former president Gerald R. Ford). -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The point of having values by which you lead your life, DeVos says, is freedom--the freedom to do what you want and also, necessarily, he insists, the freedom to do the right thing. He identifies three sets of eight values that he maintains are essential to--in the words of the section titles--"Upholding Freedom," "Becoming Free," and "Preserving Freedom." All 24 values he discusses are personal in nature; that is, although most are social in their intentions (e.g., reliability, fairness, stewardship, charity, etc.), individual persons, not groups or institutions, must practice them for them to have any effect. Each of the 24 chapters is so directly worded and employs so many real-life stories to illustrate the particular value in action that they bespeak a probable origin in DeVos' public speeches and make the book preeminently readable. Meanwhile, DeVos' assertion of the Christianity he feels undergirds all these values will comfort many readers but, because he never proselytizes or preaches, not put off others who mistrust Christianity. Excellent popular moral teaching. Ray Olson