An iconoclastic, consistently wise breakdown of the inanities of corporate life.
A short report on the pitfalls of American business culture.
In this brief, fast-paced work, Harrison (The Great Divide, 2017, etc.) draws on lessons and insights that he’s gleaned from decades spent in the corporate world; he’s worked as a writer, editor, and communications executive for several organizations in the Chicago area, including the Fortune 500 health care company Baxter International. He first takes readers through the hiring process, including “onboarding”—the often slipshod initial orientation process for new hires. He then runs through various types of bosses—including “the ‘credit grabber,’ who takes credit for all successes but blames others for failures” and “the ‘cool boss,’ who tries too hard to be one of the team”—and the varying degrees of humiliation involved in reporting to them all. He also dissects touchy subjects, such as exit interviews, performance reviews, and pay rates, from the viewpoint of someone who’s seen it all and is happy to write about it—and he does so with a frankness that’s often missing from books of this type: “The day I learned how worthless performance reviews are,” he writes at one point, “was the day I got fired…immediately after receiving a stellar performance review.” Several faddish concepts in the corporate world come in for gentle (and not-so-gentle) ribbing; for instance, he dismisses the idea of “facilitators”—outsiders that some businesses bring in to run meetings—although he acknowledges that somebody has to ride herd on the inevitable “loudmouth/blowhard/know-it-all” at such gatherings. According to the author, many corporate problems are ultimately rooted in “companies’ inability to hire the best people to run their various departments and functions.” But his diagnoses of corporate pitfalls and idiocies range far beyond human resources, touching on such things as the semantics of job titles and how faking interest is “a necessary evil in the business world.” In all cases, his stern common sense and irreverence—as in the chapter title “Shaking Hands (and other stupid protocols by which you’re judged)”—will strike readers as a breath of fresh air.
An iconoclastic, consistently wise breakdown of the inanities of corporate life.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4575-6614-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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