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
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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