A well-written and engaging look at leaders in agriculture.
A debut agriculture book offers an introduction to women changing the field.
In this volume, a companion to her 2016 documentary, Wu profiles women working in agriculture who are revolutionizing the industry. Twelve women are the subjects of their own chapters, and there are 11 shorter profiles in the book’s final chapter.The author presents women from a variety of sociocultural and educational backgrounds who work in different aspects of the industry, including as farm managers, data scientists, biologists, and software engineers. The women are primarily based in the United States, but Wu also includes several from other countries. The profiles explore the women’s personal and professional backgrounds, the insights that led to their discoveries and innovations, and how they see their roles in the companies they run. Although many of the women are involved in highly specialized research and technical work, the author makes their activities both intriguing and comprehensible to readers with no knowledge of the agriculture sector (Thuy-Le Vuong “developed an extraction method that retains the nutrients from the redmelon fruit while avoiding the use of organic solvents”). Readers who are more interested in the business side of agriculture will also find plenty of noteworthy tidbits, as the profiles examine the companies themselves, from finding startup funding and leasing lab space to managing and mentoring. Wu does an excellent job of delivering many different aspects of the agriculture industry and explaining how the women featured in the book fit into the broader context of the field. The text is generally well crafted and engrossing, and even readers who have never before considered how the temperature of a beehive is a representation of its overall health or calculated how many days of fodder are available in a given pasture are likely to be both captivated and informed by it. A wealth of photographs taken by Wu and contributed by the book’s subjects give readers a clear picture of who these women are and what they do.
A well-written and engaging look at leaders in agriculture.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61-035575-9
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Craven Street Books
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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