Walter Cronkite calls New Yorker Lewis Cullman “one of the nation’s major and most generous philanthropists.”

In his engaging memoir, Cullman writes of engineering the very first leveraged buyout — in 1964, putting up $1,000 cash, he and colleagues bought Orkin Exterminating for $62.4 million —and of giving vast amounts of his fortune (more than $100 million and counting) back to society. Cullman, a descendant of Emma Lazarus and the founder of Barnard College (among other distinguished forebears) recalls the entertaining details of flying by the seat of his pants as a business innovator, and includes warm portraits of family members and friends who influenced him. At the book’s end, he leads a crusade for private foundations to make their businesses fully account-able, and to return their “stagnant wealth” to society and the economy.