An engaging, personal, and ultimately persuasive examination of the true worth of diversity.
A passionate, levelheaded look at the necessity of diversity in the workplace.
In his direct, immensely readable nonfiction debut, Richardson, an African-American, judges the idea of workplace diversity on pragmatic grounds: “Diversity as a workplace concept should be measured for its effectiveness,” he writes. But he opposes the idea of diversity for diversity’s sake: “The thought still exists,” he writes, “that if we collect a comfortable number of people who aren’t White, male, and heterosexual, we’d have diversity!”—something that he flatly calls “a completely flawed ideology.” In this eye-opening work, Richardson draws extensively on his own personal history growing up in the late 1960s and ’70s, after major civil rights gains had been achieved. He’s a U.S. Air Force veteran and New York state trooper who was in Manhattan on 9/11 and who patrolled the streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In barbed, personal anecdotes with a good deal of dry humor, he relates his own experiences with racism: “If I walked through a parking lot, every White woman who caught a glimpse of my dark skin locked their car doors in fear,” he writes. “It sounded like a symphony, with every lock hitting its note at the precise same time.” He also stresses the fundamental differences between three often confused ideas: affirmative action, which he says was designed mainly to level the employment playing field for nonwhite minorities; equal opportunity programs, which he says were created to redress discrimination that still remained; and diversity itself, which he characterizes as the incorporation of a broad variety of cultural, racial, and personal viewpoints into communal thinking—with the goal of improving that thinking: “Profits, high productivity, loyalty, etc. are the rewards received when diversity is implemented correctly,” he writes. “They aren’t the reason for it—survival is.”
An engaging, personal, and ultimately persuasive examination of the true worth of diversity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 156
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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