Golden Opportunity: Remarkable Careers That Began at McDonald’s

A tepid mix of micro-biographies and life lessons, Teets, McDonald’s vice president and general manager of the Rocky Mountain region, brings together such personalities as Jay Leno, Andie MacDowell, and Jeff Bezos to highlight careers that began with “flipping burgers.” Most of those included, however, are not celebrities, though each is granted a chapter detailing his or her career at McDonald’s, work experience, and the life lessons acquired. Perhaps because of this general anonymity, it’s actually the former employees’ anecdotes about McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc that stand out. Whether it is the image of Kroc “scraping the gum off the asphalt” or when he “rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt,... picked up trash and hosed away milkshake spills,” memories of Kroc and his lessons evince the drive and obsession he instilled throughout the company. The book is arranged chronologically by the decade each person started working at McDonald’s and, as the focus skews more toward the personalities profiled than anything unique relating to McDonald’s, it feels predictably erratic. Many of the profiles are only three or four pages long, so one can easily leaf through at random to read some excerpt about a person of interest, but the book suffers from its lack of unifying theme. (Aug.)