An intensely readable field guide to using power without abusing it.
A book offers a taxonomy of the different kinds of power and a manual for understanding and employing it.
In her latest volume, Diamond (co-author, with Lee Spark Jones: A Path Made by Walking, 2005) takes a cleareyed and refreshingly nonjudgmental look at power—its nature, history, and most of all the techniques for using it and not abusing it. Power, which she defines as “our capacity to impact and influence our environment,” is for her a neutral thing, neither good nor bad but merely raw energy that exists to be shaped and harnessed. Far from being a poison as it’s typically characterized, power possesses a generative, creative potential, the author stresses. She insists that “we need power…[it] may be difficult to master, but it’s vital to have.” But her book, which assesses power in many of its modern incarnations and traces its manipulation, remains intensely focused on the potential for abuse (the author immediately invokes Lord Acton’s famous dictum about power corrupting). Diamond keeps reminding her readers of their human fallibility, especially in contact with power. “Our confidence soars as our perceptions grow more distorted,” she writes. “Our self-esteem rises, while our self-awareness decreases. Our capacity to feel empathy for others lessens, just as the influence we have over them increases.” Diamond begins her account with a broad look at the nature of power in modern society, but although she mentions doctors, lawyers, therapists, and religious leaders, her book is clearly aimed at business executives, and a certain TED-talk plasticity works its way into most of the text, which stresses boardroom-style reflections on managing people and using power to reinforce authority. One of the book’s goals is to help such CEOs (and CEOs–in-training) find their “powerprint,” their own personal-power equation, and this goal is illustrated by stories from history and the lives of entrepreneurial icons like Steve Jobs. Diamond’s prose throughout is straightforward and aphoristically quotable—people interested in power (or hoping to wield it) should find this book mesmerizing.
An intensely readable field guide to using power without abusing it.Pub Date: March 10, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Belly Song Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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