An informative but stiff manual that delivers well-earned advice on business and marriage.
A guide to work-life balance advises professional couples.
Dual-income households have long been the norm in the United States, with women increasingly enjoying professional careers that rival or surpass their husbands’. Even so, succeeding as one of these “dual-career couples,” as Gordon and Bluestein call them, is not just a matter of landing the right jobs. It’s necessary that couples find a workable equilibrium so that the partnership can succeed at home while each of its members thrives professionally. When kids are thrown into the mix, it can get even more complicated. “Especially after they have children,” note the authors in their introduction, “couples often negotiate career decisions and work-life balance in response to short-term pressures rather than stepping back and constructing a sustainable framework for their lives. Some of those decisions cause later regrets.” With this book, the authors use their own experiences as a high-powered, professional couple to advise members of the next generation on how to achieve the careers they want while successfully building lives with the partners they love. They explain the best ways to be a supportive partner, manage money, negotiate compromises, and maintain an independent professional identity while sharing a unified domestic one. The authors can certainly claim to have dealt with these issues at the highest level. Gordon was a CEO for a Fortune 500 company while Bluestein worked as a consultant to some of the world’s largest corporations. Together, they raised two children. Though the majority of the guide concerns their own experiences, the prose reads more like a polished bit of copy than a memoir: “For Ilene, going to London was a way of breaking out of Boston. She loved the fact that it was a high-energy, very global city….Nowadays, when someone says they’re moving to Europe, Ilene advises, ‘do Asia, or else you’re not challenging yourself. Europe is too easy now.’ ” While the tips are fairly conventional, the advice is quite helpful. The presentation, on the other hand, is decidedly dated. There’s little emotion here for a book about relationships, which results in a rather wooden portrait of the central couple.
An informative but stiff manual that delivers well-earned advice on business and marriage.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73788-500-9
Page Count: 164
Publisher: The Blue Sun Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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