Success Stories of a Failure Analyst

MY FATHER-IN-LAW WAS BORN IN 1938, in a house without a toilet, in a flyspeck of a town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. His grandfathers were both lumberjacks. His father was a plowman. If anything was expected of Franklin St. John at all, it was that he would follow one of those two career paths. Instead, through more quirks of fate that can quickly be recounted, he became, of all things, a metallurgical engineer. . . .

What he sees as a personal account of random events that happened to him, I view as a story of 20th century America itself. He is a legitimate rags-to-riches tale, a Horatio Alger story-the sort of character who isn''t much seen outside of fiction. He''s the American Dream made flesh, a popular myth come to life.

"You''re that rarest of things," I told him. "Something people talk about all the time, but hardly ever encounter: A self-made millionaire."

This book, by LA Times best-selling author Greg Olear, is that story.