Headlee offers little groundbreaking information, but her advice is well taken and will prove useful for harried readers.
An argument against the notion that “our carefully designed strategies and gadgets will make us better.”
As a popular radio host, journalist, and speaker, Headlee (We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter, 2017) has plenty of experience in trying—and often failing—to achieve the so-called work-life balance. “While I’d always been driven, I’d also been exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed,” writes the author of her years of struggle to advance her career, pay the bills, and manage the responsibilities of being a single mother. She had hoped that “when I achieved financial stability, my stress would end.” However, the opposite was true: Once she was offered bigger money for speeches and other jobs, it was tougher to turn them down. “If your goal is less stress and more happiness,” she writes, “years of scientific research have proven that better than trading your time for money, it’s best to trade your money for time.” Easier said than done, and though Headlee remains highly productive, with a schedule that will leave many readers breathless, she does an effective job of showing how the Industrial Revolution changed the time-money equation, how multitasking makes us less focused and efficient, why connecting online rather than engaging in human interaction can be dehumanizing, and how you can feel better about your life by acting kindly. Among her many suggestions: Engage in conversation with four strangers per day; keep track of how you are spending your time, because you’re probably not as busy as you think you are; and acknowledge that downtime can make you more creative and productive as well as happier. Readers are advised not to take the author’s title literally, because there is so much that can be done to reassert the importance of leisure in life, including reading a book about it.
Headlee offers little groundbreaking information, but her advice is well taken and will prove useful for harried readers.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2473-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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