A fine personal narrative, but readers will likely want more practical parenting tips.
Ratner look at issues regarding advertising and children in this memoir and parenting-advice book.
The author’s father, a Minneapolis marketing executive, brought home the family’s first television set when Ratner was in kindergarten. The young boy watched a variety of TV shows, including Dragnet and The Ernie Kovacs Show—and even sometimes watched test patterns. Ratner also consumed all sorts of other media, from magazines to radio, and even created his own block-wide radio broadcast as a kid. As an adult, he talked his way into a job selling radio advertising time and then voiced the ads and took on other on-air work. That led to his big break as the voice of Flint for the 1980s animated series G.I. Joe. But although Ratner was steeped in the world of media and messaging, he had a healthy distrust of it. He’d learned from his father how advertisers manipulate viewers, particularly children, so he went on to create an educational program for grade-schoolers about the effects of ads. The personal anecdotes that make up the bulk of this book are lively and warm. He includes tidbits about how he raised his own daughters with far stricter limits on media exposure than he had, as well as longer passages about the marketing efforts behind juggernauts such as the Barbie and G.I. Joe franchises. The best parts of Ratner’s story, however, are rooted in the past. The true complexity of today’s parenting, when TV is the least of one’s digital worries, never comes through. As a result, the promise of the book’s subtitle, “The Truth Behind the Media’s Effect on Children and What to Do About It,” is never fulfilled. This is too bad, as Ratner’s stories of his childhood and his later adult skepticism didn’t need to be wrapped up in a “digital-age parenting” package—they could have stood very well on their own.
A fine personal narrative, but readers will likely want more practical parenting tips.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1939629050
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Familius
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2014
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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