Will help those who want to untie their tongues and avoid the hazards of miscommunication.
In this self-professed consolidation of popular communication, assertiveness, career and leadership-training best practices, Friedlander bridges the gap between business and personal communication by offering a synthesized approach that can be used at the office or home.
Friedlander’s comprehensive handbook is designed to guide the reader through a step-by-step, broad-based methodology for improving personal and professional communication. Starting with the basics, she organizes the material into functional sections that gradually build on a logical progression of ideas, with each of the 13 chapters ending with a five-point summary meant to maximize knowledge transfer. Context-sensitive anecdotes, practical exercises, illustrative examples and clearly highlighted takeaways fill out a user-friendly presentation that delivers what it promises–self-awareness, self-expression and enhanced communication. The “world of work” is the primary context for examining the nature of good communication skills, but Speak Easy effectively widens its net to pull in a varied target audience composed of diverse roles and lifestyles. The book approaches its topic in a balanced yet unexpected way. The author brings together the nuts-and-bolts of communication, but then connects this to the emotional component of human interaction, illustrating the pitfalls, potholes and dead ends that can result from a badly chosen word, or worse, an uncontrolled verbal meltdown. As obvious as these hazards might appear, helping the reader to see that words, actions and feelings work together to create successful communication is a strategy that unifies the book. In a marketplace glutted with self-help guides, how-to tomes and handbooks for dummies and idiots, Speak Easy rises above the cacophony of business and personal-growth gurus who promise the moon to offer clear, practical and actionable personal change that can actually make a difference. Easily readable, visually presented and impeccably organized, this work will provide valuable reading for any business, family or individual.
Will help those who want to untie their tongues and avoid the hazards of miscommunication.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-3192-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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