From the Ground Up

Howard Schultz's account of what leaders, businesses and citizens owe one another runs along two interwoven narratives. The first follows his conflicted boyhood in the Brooklyn housing projects, including experiences he had never revealed, which pushed him to become his family's first college graduate and to build the kind of company his working-class father never had the chance to work for. The second goes behind the scenes at Starbucks, which he grew from eleven stores, as it offered health insurance and free college tuition to part-time baristas and took on controversial initiatives about race and refugees. The memoir became a New York Times bestseller.

Bill Gates endorsed it as a reminder that success comes from partnership and community rather than individual determination alone, and Serena Williams praised it as a story for anyone who has overcome adversity.