A book that showcases and contributes to an African-American family’s impressive record of achievement.
A Louisiana State University basketball player turned entrepreneur shares his principles for success in this debut memoir/motivational guide.
Temple, eldest son of the first-ever African-American to play varsity basketball at LSU, was “taught a solid value system….The value of hard work; the qualities of respecting people, leading people, and helping those who may not be able to help themselves; and the ability to maintain a single-minded focus.” He first provides an overview of his family’s spirit and accomplishments, his “lineage of success,” which includes a grandfather who had “the only black-owned cleaners in the small town of Edgard, Louisiana,” and a brother who currently plays for the NBA. He then segues into how he’s personally applied his family’s values, most particularly his persistence in playing on sports teams and his effective responses to various challenges prior, during, and after college. For example, Temple had a heartbreaking injury on his first day of LSU basketball practice yet used his recovery time well, eventually earning a Ph.D., as well as growing to be a key leader playing on the LSU basketball team. Temple also made inroads with the NBA post-graduation, but another injury became the impetus to shift to his current career as an agency owner at financial services distributor Primerica, as well as a motivational speaker. Temple ends each of his chapters with “WSTM Lessons Learned,” such as “Make a habit of not quitting,” and wraps up with discussing how he and his wife met and work to be effective partners for themselves and their children. It’s not surprising that Temple is doing well as a public speaker; his book combines colorful life stories, such as how he stood up to a team bully, with clear, bracing advice, including that “the three common denominators of success” are coachability, focus, and work ethic. “The first step to total coachability is SEEKING IT OUT,” Temple advises. “You should SEEK OUT whatever it is that will help you in becoming more successful in the desired area that you’re striving to excel in.” While Temple’s lesson recaps are occasionally repetitive and/or don’t always seem to align with the content of a particular chapter, his repeated emphasis on positivity, journaling, clear goal setting, and, of course, ongoing hard work is difficult to dispute.
A book that showcases and contributes to an African-American family’s impressive record of achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9970336-0-1
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Temple Life
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An absorbing biography that will help Stead's fans place her fiction in the context of her life and may well attract new readers to her work. Christina Stead (190283), who was born and died in Australia (about which, writes Rowley, she was ``both nostalgic and patronising''), did her writing during her years in Europe and the US. Although she tapped real events and people for her fiction—and not just for her autobiographical novels, including the superb The Man Who Loved Children—she could be secretive in her private papers, identifying people by fictional names, writing in code, and ultimately destroying many documents. Despite this obstacle, Rowley (an Australian academic, currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University) offers a coherent and convincing portrait that reaches back into a youth in which Stead was overshadowed by her father, who first instilled in her a lifelong socialist orientation, insecurity about her appearance (he dubbed her ``Pig Face''), and a yearning to be adored by a man. When she arrived in London in 1928, Stead found just the man—William Blake (originally Blech), whom Rowley succinctly describes as a ``Marxist investments manager who seemed to know something about everything.'' Blake hired her to be his secretary, and Stead accompanied him to Paris, where their romance flourished—despite a wife who would not divorce Blake for 23 years. When the bank employing Blake collapsed, the pair fled to New York. Stead's writings earned only modest royalties even when favorably reviewed, and Blake could not find work, so they returned to Europe in a consistently difficult hunt for economic security that gave their lives a nomadic flavor. By 1949, Stead said to a friend, ``I have been a writer, quite unsuccessfully for twenty years,'' although a revival of interest in her work, which began in the mid-1960s, helped her return to Australia in 1969 as a famous author and ``Official Personage.'' A welcome study of an underrated author. (16 pages of photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8050-3411-0
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
Full of interesting factoids–-but the blatant advertising for Kushner's products is pervasive to the point the book becomes...
A wake-up call about caffeine from a committed and self-interested author.
Formerly a newspaper journalist in Russia who consumed enormous amounts of coffee and cigarettes, Kushner relocated to New York City during the early '90s. Shortly thereafter, she learned she suffered from Celiac disease, a genetic disorder that was perhaps exacerbated by products containing caffeine. She researched caffeine substitutes, none of them suiting her tastes. And she discovered that certain substitutes contain gluten, another substance that those with Celiac cannot tolerate. Thus, she "invented" soy coffee and uses this book as her marketing platform. It's frequently informative, though, once the the text moves beyond pure publicity. For instance, she mentions that England's King Charles II attempted to shutter coffeehouses in 1675 because men tended to neglect their families while staying out to consume caffeine. Widespread protest, though, defeated the ban; the Boston Tea Party of 1773 resulted in the consumption of coffee as a patriotic duty; the world's first espresso machine began making noise in France in 1882; Maxwell House coffee is named after a Nashville hotel; US coffee sales boomed during the 1920s thanks to Prohibition; the US imported 70 percent of the world’s coffee crop at the beginning of WWII; Starbucks opened its first store in Seattle in 1971. These are just a few pieces of coffee trivia the author offers. She also briefly discusses the history of the American addiction to caffeine, explaining the chemistry of the substance, listing specific health threats (heart disease, central-nervous-system disorders, ulcers, cancer) and mapping out specific routes to end dependency. Unfortunately, though, the style interferes with the substance, as the tone is often shrill and alarmist. An appendix titled "Make a Difference!" is the call to action here, urging readers to petition the FDA for fuller disclosure among coffee manufacturers of specific product caffeine levels.
Full of interesting factoids–-but the blatant advertising for Kushner's products is pervasive to the point the book becomes soporific.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-9747582-0-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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