“Our society puts great store on 'doing.' All around us we see people working at it even when they no longer have to 'do,' as if in dread of a quiet moment that might bring them face to face with themselves. This way it is possible for a man's life to be lost to him, for him to feel at the last moment that his existence has been no more than a bullet fired point blank at the earth... Probably I am only flattering myself by imagining that my successful doing in the financial market place, that most pragmatic of institutions, was an attempt to serve my sentence as quickly as possible as to get my doing behind me. But even then, when I was in the clutches of the need to be successful, the need to be approved of by others, to do in all things what I supposed was expected of me as son, student, husband, father, partner, citizen, there remained a secret part of me that only in solitude could I find what I was looking for but had no words to define.”
Angus MacDonald has found his words. His book charts a course of self-discovery, and the very act of writing it led hi, further to define the remembered self. This self is most emphatically defined in terms of its real connections with other people – family, friends, associates – whose memories populate his mind. And in revealing it forthrightly, he establishes a kinship with his reader, who will likely find that he privately shares many feelings that MacDonald openly expresses.
The outer frame of the narrative relates episodes both typical and critical stretching over half a lifetime: growing up in Baltimore in a household that was very much feeling the effects of the Depression – joining the Navy as a seaman in World War II only to be fortuitously “shipped out” to Harvard and then down the Charles River to M.I.T. for apprenticeship training that led to a degree in aeronautical engineering – taking a master's degree at M.I.T. after the war and a research assistantship there – working for several years at Oak Ridge in an attempt to design a nuclear-powered rocket – shifting from engineering to administrative problems – joining a firm specializing in negotiating corporate mergers, becoming a partner, finally establishing his own highly successful financial firm.
If the broad outline of the book is a classic American success story, its inner life lies in the seemingly little things, the affectionately remembered details – things like selling shows in the Tennessee hills, scuba diving with a daughter off Bermuda, getting to like a father-in-law, a public ass-kissing ceremony at Eliot House, Harvard.
And some things that can't ordinarily be seen are made vividly visible. Through an engineer's eyes we are allowed, for example, a glimpse of a nuclear reactor in operation at the atomic level, and we can follow a stream of air as it twists its way through the innards of a jet engine.
There are passages in the book in which MacDonald consults his own thoughts and reflections based on his experience and reading. For the most part, though, there are people around, people of all sorts. They are observed warmly but not sentimentally: the warts are there, and so are the warps of personality. Looking back, after a divorce and analysis, MacDonald is able to take the same full measure of himself, with a degree of understanding that is rarely found in today's successful American businessman.
