A family story unlike any other that unsparingly excavates the pain of small minds and inflexible traditions.
Dietch’s (Yaounde Univ./Private Law) novel explores the plight of an embittered African man whose parents commit suicide after discovering that four of their five children are gay.
Jean-Noel, the youngest son of five siblings, leaves his native African village to become a tour guide in order to escape the tragedy of his family. His three brothers left home to live in Europe, initially breaking the hearts of their parents, who are further shocked to learn that all three of them are gay. When it’s also revealed that their daughter is having an affair with a powerful woman, Jean-Noel’s parents kill themselves, as they’re unable to face the village’s condemnation. Jean-Noel blames his siblings’ sexual orientation on the global media, believing homosexuality to be an “imported” phenomenon. He attempts to start a family of his own only to discover that he’s infertile. When Rocky, a Los Angeles–based screenwriter, comes to the country for a vacation and enlists Jean-Noel’s services, the young African man is forced to confront his deepest rage: will he be able to move beyond the difficulties of his early years and lead a happy life, or will he take his anger toward the mainstream media out on Rocky? This book is a chronicle of deeply buried resentment and misunderstanding, unapologetic in its depiction of anti-gay sentiment and blind hate. Its numerous derogatory references to gays place the characters in a light that many readers will find solidly ignorant. However, Jean-Noel’s own struggles with infertility and his later role as a beloved “uncle” to another man’s triplets create a genuinely engaging dynamic and a compelling lead character. Why do people cling to hatred, the book seems to ask, when love often surrounds them in abundance? Dietch’s prose style is frequently cliché-ridden and clunky (“he bustled and bustled again, trying his utmost to reach his lover’s most inner genital cavity”), and the lack of more worldly, experienced viewpoint characters can make the principal players’ homophobia difficult to take. However, the novel’s exploration of small-town prejudice, along with its soap-opera–like structure of tragedy and ultimate redemption, is intriguingly original.
A family story unlike any other that unsparingly excavates the pain of small minds and inflexible traditions.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496956064
Page Count: 216
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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