A forceful and thought-provoking call to diversify the workforce with marginalized groups.
DeLong discusses the philosophy behind and practicalities of hiring workers from marginalized groups.
The author begins his text with some sobering facts about the current American workplace: The Bureau of Labor Statistics, he notes, has forecast a labor shortage in the near future—there will be about 12 million new jobs by 2030, but only nine million new entrants coming into the workforce (“You do the math,” he says). At the same time, only about 41%of the United States’ more than 11 million working-age adults with disabilities are currently in the workforce. In these pages, DeLong offers anecdotes drawn from his long experience advocating on behalf of marginalized workers and lays out practical advice for recruiting, hiring, and retaining members of three major categories of such employees: the formerly incarcerated, people with disabilities, and refugees. Tapping into this talent pool, the author stresses, takes “courage, patience, finesse, and flexibility,” and he fills these chapters with insights about the realities of the project. Writing about hiring immigrants, he cites the Congressional Budget Office’s projection that within 20 years, the immigrant workforce will be the only segment of the population still growing. “To survive and grow in the future,” DeLong writes, “most organizations must become more effective at hiring, training, and employing foreign-born workers.” The author maintains a tone of authoritative empathy throughout, the perfect register for overcoming the initial resistance he’s likely to encounter, and he insistently reminds his readers to consider the human element of the approaches he’s proposing. “It’s not about making it a huge corporate initiative,” he writes. “The thing may start with a mother, brother, cousin, or a friend who sees the challenge that a person they love can’t get a job.” Employers and potential co-workers will find DeLong’s book to be full of fascinating ideas.
A forceful and thought-provoking call to diversify the workforce with marginalized groups.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780988868625
Page Count: 326
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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