Swimming Across: A Memoir

SWIMMING ACROSS is a personal and cultural memoir tracing Andrew Grove's most formative years. Beginning on the eve of Nazi Germany's invasion of his native Hungary and ending with his flight from communism to America 16 years later, it combines a child's sense of wonder with an engineer's passion for order and detail. Grove's uplifting autobiography depicts his family's struggle to survive in the face of a host of staggering obstacles. Nearly killed by scarlet fever at the age of four, forced into hiding by the Nazis in 1944, and dogged by anti-Semitism, Andrew Grove's survival was nothing short of miraculous. In SWIMMING ACROSS, a true American hero reveals his origins and what it takes to survive...and to triumph.

Andrew Grove has earned fame and fortune as chairman and cofounder of Intel. But, we learn from this remarkable memoir, he began life under very different circumstances, narrowly escaping the Holocaust and the closing of the Iron Curtain.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1936, Grove--then called Andras Grof--grew up in a modestly prosperous, secular Jewish family. Through foresight and sheer good fortune, they avoided the fate of many of their fellow Jews, fleeing the Nazis into the countryside and living in a dark cellar in which "the sound of artillery was a continuous backdrop." Under the Communist regime that followed, Grove distinguished himself as a student of chemistry and was seemingly destined for a comfortable position in academia or industry--until revolution broke out in 1956 and he found himself in that cellar once again.

How Grove emerged, "swam across" to America, and made a new life under a new name makes a satisfying conclusion to this humane memoir, which gives readers valuable insight into the business guru and technologist. --Gregory McNamee