by Diana Wu David ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 2019
A thoughtful, insightful book that offers a calm voice in a turbulent business world.
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A forward-looking blueprint for a more gratifying work life.
Entrepreneur Wu David’s (Hong Kong ABC, 2011) business book offers sound strategies for coping with the inevitability of change. The text targets senior professionals, but it’s also appropriate for people just starting on their career paths. The author divides her discussion into three parts (“Learn,” “Cultivate,” and “Maximize”) and first examines how globalization, disruption, and increased longevity are transforming “the way people see the future of work.” Some content in Part I is futuristic, but it’s also grounded in realism, noting that, although workers may not be able to decelerate change, they can become more agile, adaptive, and resilient. In Part II, Wu David concentrates on experiential learning, urging people to experiment, reinvent, collaborate, and find focus in various ways. She provides numerous examples of people (including herself) who’ve pursued experimentation and reinvention. A key underlying theme of this part is the importance of being willing to take risks; for example, Wu David writes engagingly about strategies for pursuing new opportunities, as when she discusses the notion of “Slashers” (such as a “violinmaker/psychologist,” a “pro-athlete/investor,” or a “CFO Company A/CFO Company B”). As a networker herself, the author is committed to the idea of collaboration, and she writes about the subject authoritatively; her collaborative “exercises and action steps” should be particularly helpful for those looking to find greater value in teamwork. Part III considers the impact that one’s actions can have on one’s long-term career. Here, Wu David proposes a new way of defining success, emphasizing the idea of finding one’s purpose. This is the most philosophical portion of the book and should inspire self-reflection. In closing, the author asks a most intriguing question: “What would life…look like if we spent more time on what mattered most?” Her encouragement to do an “audit” of one’s personal and professional lives may be intimidating to some, but the idea has merit. Overall, she offers compassionate advice, relevant examples, and involving exercises.
A thoughtful, insightful book that offers a calm voice in a turbulent business world.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1360-7
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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