Author of the week

Stephen Schwarzman has never lacked for ambition, said Miriam Gottfried in

The Wall Street Journal.

The CEO and co-founder of Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm and the world’s largest property holder as well, aims to boost the company’s holdings from $545 billion to $1 trillion by 2026.

In his new memoir,

What It

Takes, the 72-year- old Philadelphia native shares plenty of stories about the times his audacity hasn’t paid off. As a boy, he failed to persuade his father to transform the family’s modest Philadelphia linen store into the next Sears. When he was waitlisted as a teenager by Harvard, he called the dean of admissions himself, before settling for Yale. Since then, of course, many of his bets have paid off. “I always look for something that has almost limitless possibilities,” he says. “It’s as easy to do something big as it is to do something small.”

What It Takes arrives as Schwarzman faces increased criticism over his outsize wealth and influence, said Amanda Gordon in Bloomberg.com. Blackstone has been accused of profiting from the destruction of the Amazon rain forest and from the housing losses triggered by 2008’s financial crisis. And though Schwarzman once labeled Trump “the P.T. Barnum of America,” he has remained the president’s go-to mediator in the trade war with China. Schwarzman addresses some, but not all, of such criticisms in his book, devoting most of its 354 pages to his success story and tips for emulating it. His goal, he says, is to transfer the lessons he’s learned—so that other people “have an easier run than I had.”