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LEADERSHIP IN OUR LIVES

Name: LEADERSHIP IN OUR LIVES
Author: David H. Swendsen
ISBN: 978-1499130348

THE USE AND MISUSE OF POWER

by David H. Swendsen John Earle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 5, 2014

An uneven hodgepodge of a memoir, featuring numerous lessons on leadership.

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Swendsen reflects on the leadership qualities of key figures in his life in this debut memoir.

During the 1940s, the author worked for his father at the family gas station. He writes that his dad was his “first real boss,” and a man who “treated his employees fairly and thoughtfully.” Yet not all of Swendsen’s “early bosses” displayed such positive leadership traits. His high school basketball coach, for example, played favorites, and his chemistry teacher “always did things his own way,” and accidentally blew the windows out of the classroom lab. Swendsen went on to graduate from college and join the U.S. Air Force. During flight school, he stood up to his sometimes abusive superiors. After marrying his sweetheart, Jackie, he began a long career as a park warden, where he says he had supervisors of varying quality. He remembers Bill, one of his favorites: “During the many night rides when Bill rode with me he acted like my able assistant, not my boss.” From this experience, the author concluded that “[r]eal leaders are able to put themselves in the hands of a subordinate.” Swendsen includes plenty of anecdotes about other good and bad bosses, and dozens of personal photographs. At the end, he adds several chapters about “operationally effective leadership” and a list of famous quotes about the subject, which feel tacked on. He concludes with a poem dedicated to his “quiet leader”––his late wife, to whom he was married for 58 years. This sincere memoir effectively demonstrates how various leaders influenced Swendsen’s life. However, it’s likely too personal to interest general readers, and the editing sometimes falls short; for example, he writes that one boss’s “dependency on alcohol caused him uneasy problems in running his business.…Documented accounts show that George Washington drank in moderation and was outspoken against the overuse of alcohol.” Such asides feel too didactic, inviting readers to consider that “show, don’t tell” might be sound advice for good writers and good leaders.

An uneven hodgepodge of a memoir, featuring numerous lessons on leadership.

Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014

ISBN: 978-1499130348

Page Count: 118

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)