In this sweet memoir and parenting guide, a seasoned CEO tells how fatherhood has netted him rewarding results.
Efessiou, in his debut, gently offers parenting advice as he tells his own story of fatherhood. As a young, up-and-coming executive, he read a 1990 article in Fortune magazine titled “Why Grade ‘A’ Executives Get An ‘F’ as Parents.” According to the author, the article highlighted how the same personality traits that create successful executives—such as ambition and a willingness to work long hours—can often create neglectful, absent parents. Determined to not make the same mistakes, he decided to eschew endless office hours and use his management skills to be the best father he could possibly be. After a bitter divorce, his 7-year-old daughter chose to live with him, and he put his philosophy into action; he raised his little girl using the same guiding principles he used in business. Using a common-sense approach, Efessiou discusses practices such as “viewing the big picture” and “examining the bottom line,” and applies each principle to child-rearing. Getting children’s respect is paramount, he writes; just as bosses shouldn’t strive to be their employees’ friends, parents shouldn’t try to be their children’s buddies. Similarly, he writes that effective communication and clearly defined rules are as important at home as they are in the office. Although children are not employees, and it may seem a bit cold to compare an adult child to a return on an investment, Efessiou’s anecdotes are anything but harsh. For example, like many working parents, he scrambled to rearrange his business plans so he could attend his daughter’s childhood events. In another memorable and somewhat humorous story, he tells of how he foiled his teenage daughter’s plans for a party at their house while he was out of town on business. However, although the author’s advice is often wise, much of it is rather general, and sometimes feels like it could be displayed on motivational posters: “To achieve our bottom line goals with our children, we must teach them that they do not need to do anything unwise to be special or conform thoughtlessly to earn acceptance.” The book also includes pictures, as well as appreciative notes and letters from Efessiou’s daughter and her friend.
Affable inspiration for the harried parent.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-1599322490
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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