Tom Shapcott

So many recent books have been about failure of one sort or another that when I read Michael Zifcak’s My Life in Print, with its eminently successful life story, I was at first inclined to scan it for points of criticism. Such is human nature. There are points, of course – the book is really two quite separate texts. The first, and most compelling, is the account of Michael Zifcak as a boy in rural Slovakia, then a youth and young man of estimable drive and a sharp, organising mind, who sets himself the task of improving his life – rapidly. Through a great deal of self-study and application, he gained his accountancy qualifications and pushed himself into a key position with one of the country’s leading manufacturers (ALPA, an ‘elixir’ with impressively high alcohol content), all this during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the ensuing German occupation of Czechoslovakia, World War II and the postwar Soviet takeover.