Regardless of religious affiliation, readers facing adversity will find Marshall’s story encouraging.
A memoir from the first Black woman to be named the CEO of an NBA franchise.
Marshall has a history of being first. She was the first Black president of her high school, the first Black cheerleader at Berkeley, the first Black female officer at AT&T, and the first Black CEO of the Dallas Mavericks. She is also a cancer survivor. The author attributes her many blessings to her strong Christian faith and the love and support of her family. Marshall shares her career journey as well as intimate details of her battle with cancer and memories from her early life growing up poor in Richmond, California, where she and her family endured her father’s violent temper. However, even though her mother was “a victim of terrible domestic abuse for more than twenty years,” she provided Marshall and her siblings love and structure. Her mother always stressed the importance of school and church, places that provided the safety they lacked at home. “All six of us went to school, no matter what, just as we went to church. Structure and routine were our ways of handling my father’s unpredictable outbursts,” she writes. “Education and faith were our paths out of the projects.” Throughout, Marshall is candid about the many hardships she has endured in her life, and she shows how her faith has helped her find opportunities for growth. She also shares Bible verses that have encouraged her to continue her fight and entries from the journal she kept during her cancer treatment. Reading Marshall’s story, it is apparent that her confidence and strong will have been primary contributing factors to her success. On several occasions, the author describes times when she would seemingly forego the feelings and concerns of others in order to meet her needs or to stick to her plans. Hers is truly a story of survival.
Regardless of religious affiliation, readers facing adversity will find Marshall’s story encouraging.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35941-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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