Kawasaki is a likable guy, but this one is best browsed to avoid saccharine overload.
The tech and marketing guru offers stories from his life and career.
Born in Hawaii in 1954 and noted as the evangelist for Apple’s Macintosh in the 1980s, Kawasaki (The Art of the Start 2.0, 2015, etc.) is now “chief evangelist” at Canva, the graphic design website. In this book of inspiration and advice, he describes his working-class youth as the grandson of Japanese immigrants, his education at Stanford, and highlights from his years as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and marketer. Organized around nearly a dozen themes (“Education,” “Apple,” “Values,” etc.), the book consists of short anecdotes about life decisions followed by nuggets of wisdom drawn from each story. Results vary: The anecdotes are entertaining, reflecting varied experiences, from learning how to sell at a jewelry company to career-defining work under Steve Jobs to the joy of raising his children to his love of sports. The wisdom bits are often trite or cloying: “Seek opportunities.” “Respect authority.” “Do the right thing.” “Help people and be generous.” And so on, with tiresome predictability. Kawasaki’s candor, however, is refreshing: “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart,” he writes of a Stanford friendship that led to his Apple job. And: “It’s very hard to evangelize crap.” There is also payback for Hillary Clinton’s “hubris” in rejecting his offer of social media help in her presidential campaign. Kawasaki is direct, funny, and sometimes contradictory. “Be humble,” he writes in a book with more than 20 photos of himself with others. His soft side is balanced by fearless practicality on the key to success: “Life is sales.” There is a genuine desire to share lessons learned and help readers get ahead. Do what’s right (he resisted Trump), find challenging teachers, avoid paranoia, and set goals, even superficial ones, if you want to succeed.
Kawasaki is a likable guy, but this one is best browsed to avoid saccharine overload.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53861-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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