In this sweet memoir and parenting guide, a seasoned CEO tells how fatherhood has netted him rewarding results.
Efessiou, in his debut, gently offers parenting advice as he tells his own story of fatherhood. As a young, up-and-coming executive, he read a 1990 article in Fortune magazine titled “Why Grade ‘A’ Executives Get An ‘F’ as Parents.” According to the author, the article highlighted how the same personality traits that create successful executives—such as ambition and a willingness to work long hours—can often create neglectful, absent parents. Determined to not make the same mistakes, he decided to eschew endless office hours and use his management skills to be the best father he could possibly be. After a bitter divorce, his 7-year-old daughter chose to live with him, and he put his philosophy into action; he raised his little girl using the same guiding principles he used in business. Using a common-sense approach, Efessiou discusses practices such as “viewing the big picture” and “examining the bottom line,” and applies each principle to child-rearing. Getting children’s respect is paramount, he writes; just as bosses shouldn’t strive to be their employees’ friends, parents shouldn’t try to be their children’s buddies. Similarly, he writes that effective communication and clearly defined rules are as important at home as they are in the office. Although children are not employees, and it may seem a bit cold to compare an adult child to a return on an investment, Efessiou’s anecdotes are anything but harsh. For example, like many working parents, he scrambled to rearrange his business plans so he could attend his daughter’s childhood events. In another memorable and somewhat humorous story, he tells of how he foiled his teenage daughter’s plans for a party at their house while he was out of town on business. However, although the author’s advice is often wise, much of it is rather general, and sometimes feels like it could be displayed on motivational posters: “To achieve our bottom line goals with our children, we must teach them that they do not need to do anything unwise to be special or conform thoughtlessly to earn acceptance.” The book also includes pictures, as well as appreciative notes and letters from Efessiou’s daughter and her friend.
Affable inspiration for the harried parent.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-1599322490
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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