Kawasaki is a likable guy, but this one is best browsed to avoid saccharine overload.
The tech and marketing guru offers stories from his life and career.
Born in Hawaii in 1954 and noted as the evangelist for Apple’s Macintosh in the 1980s, Kawasaki (The Art of the Start 2.0, 2015, etc.) is now “chief evangelist” at Canva, the graphic design website. In this book of inspiration and advice, he describes his working-class youth as the grandson of Japanese immigrants, his education at Stanford, and highlights from his years as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and marketer. Organized around nearly a dozen themes (“Education,” “Apple,” “Values,” etc.), the book consists of short anecdotes about life decisions followed by nuggets of wisdom drawn from each story. Results vary: The anecdotes are entertaining, reflecting varied experiences, from learning how to sell at a jewelry company to career-defining work under Steve Jobs to the joy of raising his children to his love of sports. The wisdom bits are often trite or cloying: “Seek opportunities.” “Respect authority.” “Do the right thing.” “Help people and be generous.” And so on, with tiresome predictability. Kawasaki’s candor, however, is refreshing: “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart,” he writes of a Stanford friendship that led to his Apple job. And: “It’s very hard to evangelize crap.” There is also payback for Hillary Clinton’s “hubris” in rejecting his offer of social media help in her presidential campaign. Kawasaki is direct, funny, and sometimes contradictory. “Be humble,” he writes in a book with more than 20 photos of himself with others. His soft side is balanced by fearless practicality on the key to success: “Life is sales.” There is a genuine desire to share lessons learned and help readers get ahead. Do what’s right (he resisted Trump), find challenging teachers, avoid paranoia, and set goals, even superficial ones, if you want to succeed.
Kawasaki is a likable guy, but this one is best browsed to avoid saccharine overload.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53861-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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