Book Review - "In Pursuit of the Common Good" by Paul Newman and AE Hotchner

Paul Newman was an extraordinary man who left his legacy in life in numerous areas. Most know him primarily as an actor in over fifty movies and several Broadway Plays. Some of his most famous roles were in the movies about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. However, when his movie days were winding down and he realized that he had a new outlook on food and nutrition, he started a company making salad dressing. Newman made a mark in the world with his food creations, but it is all of the good he did with the profits that he made and donated that really made a difference in the world.Paul Newman and one of his best friends, A.E. Hotchner set out to write a autobiography/biography about Newman and his famous life. The book focuses more on the food empire he created and rarely mentions his acting career. His book In Pursuit of the Common Good: Twenty-Five Years of Improvising the World, One Bottle of Salad Dressing at a Time, shows how he created his empire from a very modest and far-fetched beginning into a company profiting tens-of-millions of dollars a year.For Christmas every year, Newman liked to make salad dressing for his closest friends and family and give it to them as gifts in used wine bottles. His recipients liked the dressing so much, that Newman and his friend Hotchner decided they should try to produce the dressing on a large scale and sell it to local stores. His salad dressing was different than all of the other dressings available because he used only natural ingredients and had a strong dislike of chemicals and ingredients that were artificial and simply used to preserve. Many dressings that dominate grocery store shelves to this day contain dozens of artificial ingredients simply meant to give the dressing the ability to sit around longer before selling. Newman's dressing could not sit around very long due to the lack of preservatives, but that was completely fine with him.One of the largest difficulties with his desire to sell dressing in the grocery stores was finding a bottler. He went through numerous bottlers and food companies before finding a bottler that would treat him and Hotchner fairly and bottle for a fair price. The two men hired several chemists and food technicians to test different arrangements of ingredients for the first salad dressing. Newman was very picky about taste and ingredients and finding the right combination of ingredients was always very time consuming. However, when he did find the right combination and pushed his first bottles into stores, the outcome was surprising. He did not expect a salad dressing by a movie star with his face on the bottle to do very well, but the dressing was an instant hit. Grocery stores started ordering thousands of bottles and the profits started rolling in.Profits were useless to Newman. He had made a substantial amount of money in his life and knew that he wanted to give back to the world in a big way, so he decided to donate all of his profits to various charities. This was not only a very generous gesture, but helped his salad dressings gain even more popularity. People seemed to want to buy the dressing not only because it was delicious, but because their money was not going to a greedy corporation. All of the money people spend on the dressing would go directly to helping people with chronic diseases, kids in need, and various charity cases across the world. Newman proved that he did not care about the money and that he was a true humanitarian.After the first salad dressing sold like crazy, Newman developed more and more dressings to accompany it. On each bottle was his movie star face with a wacky label on the back telling a humorous, fictional story of how the dressing came to be. He even went on to develop other foods like salsas and ice cream which all sold very well. As his food empire began to grow larger and larger, he realized he needed to do something extra-special with his profits. He decided to develop The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. This camp was specially designed with the help of contributors such as the owner of Anheuser Busch and other rich contributors to help kids with chronic and terminal illness. The idea was for kids to come to the camp every summer and leave their worries behind. Kids would come from all over the country to be with other kids like themselves, to have fun first and worry about sickness second, and to live a life as normal as possible.The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp was a huge success as everything else Paul Newman did in life, and other similar camps started emerging all over the world. The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp was designed as a wild west town with dozens of buildings, camp houses, a food hall, and state-of-the-art hospital so kids could receive their treatments while at camp. Investors and young people from all over the United States, the United Kingdom, and even Africa called Newman to ask for their own camps. Kids all over the world now can leave their worries behind and go to summer camp for a few weeks out of every year. Newman and his associates saw first hand how kids would open up to each other and tell stories of their sickness and pain that they had never told anyone before. These kids were truly forming special bonds that made their lives much more pleasant and easier to cope with.While approximately half of this book is about salad dressing and how Newman built his food empire, the other half is primarily about The Hole in the Wall Gang Camps. Most people will remember Paul Newman for his acting in both movies and Broadway and his delicious food and salad dressings, his most important contribution is the camps he helped design and build. The impact he has had on thousands of kids across the world is immeasurable and the way he did it is nothing short of amazing. If you want to read a book about one of the most philanthropic business people who ever lived, this book is for you. I rate this book a 4.5 out of 5. seuss book collection sets cat hat