Reviews for The Imposter - How a Juvenile Criminal Succeeded in Business and Life

The average rating for The Imposter - How a Juvenile Criminal Succeeded in Business and Life based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-19 00:00:00 Maximilian Kratt When the author contacted me about doing a review of his book, I very nearly said no. I get several review requests per week, so I have been forced to get choosier about the review copies I accept. But I took a closer look at the book description and changed my mind. We don’t have nearly enough books that talk honestly about the shortcomings of our juvenile justice system. Perhaps Kip Kreiling had something new and important to add? I was a little put off by the large print of the book when my copy arrived. It makes the book bulkier than it need be, and implies a readership it probably doesn’t have—the elderly? The very young? I started to read, and large print was forgotten, as I fell into the story. This was a heck of a story. One with which, unfortunately, I was all too familiar from my own experiences, raising my son as a single mother. Those preteen and teen years can be so very difficult for boys and young men growing up without good, strong male role models, and having a father present doesn’t in and of itself fill that gap. It depends on the type of father. But I could relate to young Kip’s mother painfully well, the heartbreak of watching a son struggle to find his place in a world that makes a molehill of a youthful mistake quickly turn into a mountain of trouble. What should be a “teaching moment” or a wake-up call often gets turned into a downward spiral by a juvenile justice system that is often predatory and punitive rather than caring and rehabilitative. With Kreiling’s misadventures with drug use; gangs or kids simply gone wild; with the idiocy of the current juvenile justice system—“They were turning me into a harder criminal than I already was.” (page 35)—and an educational system that has been broken for a long time; with a society in general that treats our youth as second or even last priority; a foster system that started as a good idea but is now more infamous for abuse cases than rescue stories; we are all in trouble. This cannot go on. I read with excitement, because Kreiling was telling a story that needs to be told. I’m glad to see he is an enthused marketer as well, doing everything he can to promote his book. Good. I have visions of this book being passed around juvenile delinquent homes and youth prisons, even adult prisons, with its basic message of hope: everyone can change. Indeed, perhaps that is the thought behind the large print, because those who languish in prison more often than not come from backgrounds of poverty and little to no education, so whatever can be done to make this easier to read is a good idea. A better idea: another round of editing that goes deep with cuts and brings the writing, which is not bad but not yet up to par, to the level this memoir deserves. Personally, my suggestion would be to lose the eight principles of change and to simply write his story, tell it like it was and how it is now. Write the memoir, skip the rest. Let the story tell its own lessons, rather than inserting an artificial listing of principles, or morals, at the finish of most chapters. After all, none of the lessons are particularly memorable, and certainly nothing we haven’t heard before. Principles of change such as (paraphrased)—change your environment and you will change yourself; don’t plan for failure; choose your friends carefully because you will mimic their behavior; get disciplined in pursuing your dreams, and so on, appear in countless variations in a thousand self-help books and many are already a part of the commonly known 12-step programs that, frankly, do it better. When Kreiling wrote about his own life, I was mesmerized. This was honest, raw, ugly, real. This was good and inspirational storytelling, with plenty of conflict and obstacles to be overcome, a hero that kept falling but still had something of integrity buried deep in him right from the start, keeping the reader interested and rooting for him to survive. One only had to look closely enough, and through caring eyes, to see the potential and root for it. While some of Kreiling’s intellectual explorations are mildly interesting, they, too, tended to distract from the meat of a great story. I had to think of one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read: Monster : The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member by Sanyika Shakur, who today works to end gang violence. Had Kreiling stuck to his memoir, his good message would surely have more power and less of a didactic tone. Instead, Kreiling veers into side stories about Abraham Lincoln and Ben Franklin and Ayn Rand and young Gisela, a brainwashed Communist who sees the light by spending time with a tour group of boys (including Kreiling) from the free West. These tour group boys understand that they will not change Gisela by preaching to her. They instinctively understand that she will learn in a more meaningful way simply my observing what freedom looks like in her peers from the free world. Kreiling would do well to apply the same wisdom to his book. Mind you, those side stories are interesting, and I could relate. I, too, traveled behind the Iron Curtain as a young woman. I, too, was drawn to Ayn Rand’s philosophy, and I even went through some of the same internal debates as Kreiling, wondering how and if Rand’s objectivism could fit with Christianity. I suspect if I ever met Kreiling, we’d have a heck of a lot to talk about and a great deal of experiences on which to compare notes. Yet crowding all these tangents into one book is just that, overcrowding, and dilutes from the purity of his message. This message is too important to miss. Kreiling has all the requirements to be the one to tell it. He has been to those darkest of places. He has hit despair, seen the insides of prisons, and he has known what it means to sink into and to beat an addiction and to relapse and have to beat it again. He knows what it means to betray and be betrayed. And there is no more powerful storyteller than he who knows and tells it from the heart. Kreiling has lots of heart. Or call it conscience. It is his heart and his conscience—and a keen intelligence that makes itself known even when still uneducated—that save him and save this book. Kreiling has led a remarkable life. Today a successful businessman, husband and father, he has proven that change is possible. He has shown that any addiction can be overcome. These are the makings of a great story. Cleaning away the frill and the fuss, this great story could really touch many hungry hearts and minds, those like his, despairing to keep hope alive. Four stars for message, three stars for execution. ~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet, Spring 2010 Issue

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-21 00:00:00 Jack Storey I will admit that I am not much of a reader of self-help/transformation books. The preamble for most of them starts off with, "Do you like the way things are going in your life?" Perhaps that's a cynical judgement call on my part, but I've never been wrong so far when dealing with books that fall into that category. The Imposter, however, is not like that. It is in a different league, because it possesses tidbits of the memoir genre, positive psychology, science, religious awakening, recovery, business, ethics, difficult choices, et cetera. The language is straightforward, and the simplicity mirrors that of how most young adult novels are fashioned. The potency of The Imposter lies in its intentness, for the honesty is palpable. What I liked about this book is that the author-Kip Kreiling-is the proof of what he's written about. His life is the testimony. He details the step-by-step process of his own transformation from vicious, often drug-induced juvenile criminal who would blatantly show his gun as one would a middle finger in a moment of rage, to a successful, philanthropic businessman with a happy marriage and a loving family. That is a stark and unlikely contrast indeed, for statistics often show that when a person is treading on the road of criminal rebellion, they stay on the trail of criminal defiance, often to the bitter end to permanent imprisonment or even worse. That, for the most part, is often the criminal's only consistency. Hence, what was the turnaround? First, at 17 years-of-age, it was a religious conversion to his Mormon faith, a profound happening that graced him with the gift of quitting hardcore drugs cold turkey. It allowed him to see the woundedness in others as he himself was wounded, thus transforming his circular perception-with heightened depth-of his environment and everything contained therein. But even when a religious conversion happens, it does not make all things easy squeezy lemon easy, as they say. If anything, it creates only the foundation, not the walls and roof. Often, people are grateful for the radical change for the better, despite the fact that they really had nothing to do with it. So, it leaves them with the question, What now? In Kip's case, even though he consciously didn't want to, he reverted back to his crippling bad habits via the aid of a co-worker at a limo service nicknamed Mean Irene and her friend crystal meth. And the addictive cycle started all over again. Gradually and with much struggle and hard work, he climbed out of this, too, and garnered a new enlightenment. Though he never doubted his religious conversion that started him on to the path of health and betterment, he knew that he could not change himself for religion alone. He had to change himself for him and his own individual worth. And in The Imposter, Kip showcases that one positive transformation often leads to another. It is not easy, and he makes no bones about it; he himself would attest that he was the lab rat for that evolution. Aside from himself, however, he offers historical transformative examples, citing specifically Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, two truly compelling case studies. And while religion is often a catalyst for improved lives, it does not have a monopoly on that. Even as a stand-alone, money can be a reason why people change and not religion. Read chapters five and six for further elaboration. The causes for improved change have a wide spectrum and Kip cites what he believes were his personal impulses. Yet, he offers a plethora of instances whereby the reader simply can't help but ponder to what degree and what level of quality he or she is fully living their life. Through his own life development, he is offering a microscope of self analysis for others. The reader has to do the hard work. At the beginning of The Imposter, the scene is set at a high end restaurant frequented by CEOs, COOs, CFOs and other folks in the upper echelons of the business world; people are at ease, comforted, comfortable and confident. Because they were blessed to have a unified, loving, organized and structured upbringing, they possessed all the necessary ingredients to later lift them to the pinnacles of business success. Kip Kreiling did not have that. He had chaos, inconsistency, violence and hard-bitten cynicism imbued into him, components that very rarely catapult a person to any kind of success. Yet, he managed to sit in that restaurant among the elite. And though he privately doubted whether he really belonged there, whether he was in actuality an imposter with a nice suite, degree and salary, deep down, he knew otherwise. He envisioned something better and worked hard for it. The Imposter is not a typical "self-help" book, a genre I normally dislike. It is a book of constructive insights learned through the school of hard knox, tenacity as well as a sundry of epiphanies.