Compassionate, positive encouragement for speakers who need to improve their games.
For the many people who dread public speaking, Roth Fay’s concise debut is not just instructional, but reassuring.
A public speaking coach, Roth Fay lays out a well-structured, step-by-step plan for creating any type of presentation, covering the key parts—audience, message, and presenter—in text that is informal yet highly informative, using plenty of examples (both good and bad) and reinforcing her points with useful takeaways at the end of each chapter. The author stresses the importance of audience, preaching that presenters often spend virtually all of their time thinking about themselves when they should be attentive to those they’re instructing. Her “Audience Assessment Tool” provides critical questions to ask that should help any presenter more effectively concentrate on the needs of attendees. Likewise, she offers two authoritative chapters on the presentation itself, including tips on using bold, energetic words, how to structure a presentation, the value of storytelling, and essential rules for creating good visuals. Here, Roth Fay highlights many of the common mistakes that plague presenters; she humorously addresses “non-verbal distractors,” such as playing with a pen or eyeglasses, as well as “verbal audience distractors” of the “um” and “you know” variety. Some of her wise suggestions—“Don’t be guilty of focusing only on one or two audience members” and “Don’t be afraid to go out into the audience and get within touching distance”—are sure to resonate even with experienced presenters. As for anxiety, Roth Fay provides several calming suggestions, such as reducing one’s focus on the “initial physical reaction.” Two additional chapters regarding elevator pitches and job interviews demonstrate ways the author’s advice can be applied more broadly. The tone is easy and nonthreatening, and many helpful suggestions occur throughout.
Compassionate, positive encouragement for speakers who need to improve their games.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-692-28785-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: bespeak presentation solutions, llc
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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