A book of colorful tidbits to inspire creative thought.
In this debut business-advice book, a seasoned digital artist and entrepreneur offers his insights on fostering creativity.
Margolis has had a 20-year career working with creative teams and corporate clients in entertainment, media, advertising, publishing, and finance in London and New York. Those clients have included IMG’s television division Trans World International, advertising agency Burkitt DDB (now Adam & Eve DDB), property consultancy King Sturge (now Jones Lang LaSalle), Sky Sports, and communications company Energis (now Vodafone). In this first book of a planned series, the author focuses on the first 25 of a projected 250 principles, all focused on how to create the best conditions to nurture creativity in “an increasingly complex world.” In 25 chapters, he offers musings and often amusing discussions on starter concepts, such as committing to documenting one’s ideas; eating a healthy diet; varying one’s daily commute; allowing time for meditation and daydreaming; asking “what if” instead of open-ended questions; and maximizing brainstorming sessions. Margolis sees the modern, open-plan office as “a creativity killer,” noting that one should take short breaks and go on longer-term retreats as much as possible. He discusses the “pressure paradox,” in which deadlines create creativity-crushing stress but also galvanize people into action. He describes sharing ideas with others as a “triple-edged sword”: one would miss out on constructive feedback by staying silent, but one’s ego may be unduly inflated (or deflated) by others’ responses. Overall, Margolis provides an array of chatty, easy-to-read chapters, making this book a good tool for kick-starting personal creativity. However, readers may wish for more details on how the author applied his principles to his own apparently stellar career, and his tendency toward humor can be a bit tiresome and distracting. Still, the book does offer some effective, quick-shot motivational advice. (A related website showcases some attractive visual representations of the book’s chapter titles.)
A book of colorful tidbits to inspire creative thought.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Pacific Night Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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