An aspirational, often funny, and always sharply pointed tale of winning against the odds.
The CEO and founder of Klutch Sports Group recounts a life up from the streets and into the big time.
Paul is known in sports circles as the head of Klutch, which has signed more than $3 billion in contracts. There are those from the old neighborhood, to say nothing of rivals, who write off his success to luck, as the title suggests. However, notes the author, “those who call me lucky don’t realize what kind of assembly line I was built on.” That line ran along mean streets where drugs and violence were rampant. Paul learned early on to rely on himself and not expect much from others. Some of the lessons he imparts in chapter-opening principles (“Discipline your approach”; “Build an ecosystem of empathy”) he owes to his father, a storekeeper entrepreneur who tried to keep him from the worst Cleveland had to offer; others were hard-won through experience. In the anecdotal narratives that follow his slogans, Paul builds on his ideas while recounting successes and failures. “Ain’t no stumbling your way through life,” he writes. “Black folks don’t have enough margin of error for that. Most of us have no margin of error at all.” The author adds that even if you possess an abundance of self-discipline, -training, and -control, it behooves you to roll with whatever punches come your way—“you have to plan with intent but always be ready to improvise.” Particularly well taken are Paul’s frequent reminders that the life he knew is not, in the end, so different from the cutthroat world of business, save that “in the business world, it’s harder to see who’s trying to kill you.” Though there’s plenty of braggadocio to go along with his well-intended admonitions, Paul is never too full of himself—and full of good advice.
An aspirational, often funny, and always sharply pointed tale of winning against the odds.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780593448472
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.
The WNBA star recounts her imprisonment by the Putin regime.
“My horror begins in a land I thought I knew, on a trip I wish I hadn’t taken,” writes Griner. She had traveled to Russia before, playing basketball for the Yekaterinburg franchise of the Russian league during the WNBA’s off-season, but on this winter day in 2022, she was pulled aside at the Moscow airport and subjected to an unexpected search that turned up medically prescribed cannabis oil. As the author notes, at home in Arizona, cannabis is legal, but not in Russia. After initial interrogation—“They seemed determined to get me to admit I was a smuggler, some undercover drug lord supplying half the country”—she was bundled off to await a show trial that was months in coming. With great self-awareness, the author chronicles the differences between being Black and gay in America and in Russia. “When you’re in a system with no true justice,” she writes, “you’re also in a system with a bunch of gray areas.” Unfortunately, despite a skilled Russian lawyer on her side, Griner had trouble getting to those gray areas, precisely because, with rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s people seemed intent on making an example of her. Between spells in labor camps, jails, and psych wards, the author became a careful observer of the Russian penal system and its horrors. Navigating that system proved exhausting; since her release following an exchange for an imprisoned Russian arms dealer (about which the author offers a le Carré–worthy account of the encounter in Abu Dhabi), she has been suffering from PTSD. That struggle has invigorated her, though, in her determination to free other unjustly imprisoned Americans, a plea for which closes the book.
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801345
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
