A pocket-sized pick-me-up for fans and dreamers.
Country music’s spunky doyenne presents an inspirational, feel-good stocking stuffer.
Parton channels her years of down-home sensibilities and showbiz wisdom to fans needing a life-affirming pep talk, expanding on material delivered during a commencement speech highlighting what she considers to be the eternal rewards of dreaming, learning and caring. She fondly, if fleetingly, reminisces on being raised with 11 other siblings in a “shack at the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains” and touches on her school days distracted by boys, being spoon-fed Bible chapters and rebelliously applying makeup even after being warned that it was “sinful.” Parton gets personal when writing of her 46-year marriage to Carl Dean and discusses what were initially considered as ill-conceived decisions to leave The Porter Wagoner Show to branch out into pop music then conceptualize the Dollywood theme park (she admits to knowing little about its daily operations). At the heart of Parton’s brief book are positive empowerment and a refreshing work ethic that support her travel-heavy livelihood singing, acting and fulfilling philanthropic endeavors like the Dollywood Foundation and the Imagination Library, which delivers free books to children. The author credits her boundless energy level to a minimalistic need for sleep (though she takes power naps) and true happiness surrounded by friends, family and a blessed life. Parton’s kooky, boobcentric sense of humor gels nicely with pages of song lyrics, anecdotes and countrified witticisms (“I look so totally artificial, but am so totally real”).
A pocket-sized pick-me-up for fans and dreamers.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-16248-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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