Monarch to Mongolia

He left the Colorado mountains when he was nine. He spent the next five decades going everywhere else.

Monarch to Mongolia is the true story of a boy born high in the Rocky Mountains who grew up in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, came of age in the painted deserts of Arizona, and sailed a 37-foot boat with his father across the North and South Pacific. He went on to open Hard Rock Cafes on five continents, in cities where he did not speak a word of the language. In Warsaw the opening date leaked before the building had heat, a line formed in the street, and a woman in a chinchilla coat he had never met walked in and saved the night.

And somewhere in the middle of it, eleven days in China and a woman named CiCi. He flew home, told his mother about her, and got four words back: Kurt, go get her. He proposed from the other side of the world, over the phone. It took two years to bring her home.

Kurt Berry credits almost none of it to himself. He credits a small group of people he calls The Ones, self-appointed mentors who saw something in him before he could see it, and who never once gave up on him. What they taught him was not strategy. It was how to listen with empathy, how to stay patient, and how to compete hard without becoming someone you would not want to work for.

Fifty countries taught him one thing above all else. People are far more alike than they are different. The same hopes, the same fears, the same five fingers and five toes. That is the thread running through all thirty-two chapters, from Monarch Mountain to a runway in Ulaanbaatar at thirty-four below.

This is a book for anyone who has stood at the edge of something they were not ready for and said yes anyway.