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
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
As elegant and moving as a grief memoir can be.
A deeply felt, searching examination of the feelings and memories provoked by the death of a best friend.
“Would I have been this person without you? Would I have been bold and fearless without you by my side, provoking me and laughing with joy when I succeeded at anything? I will never know, you were with me throughout my most formative years, you are so intrinsically linked to my molding that I cannot think about my fundamental traits…without also thinking of you." Carson and her best friend, Larissa, were a magical pair—not just tall and gorgeous, but also smart, funny, and very well-read Black models who shared a flat in London and went out to clubs, where people got in line to pay for their drinks. Their connection was intense, their love for each other radiant in the anecdotes and text exchanges included here. The decision to include the texts was inspired, since the friends' silly nicknames for each other ("shmoo" and "shmoomies,” "poo head," "poopoo," and more) and their many declarations of love ("You're my soulmate, do you know that?" "Of course I know that") brilliantly evoke the particular flavor of the friendship. Carson was married and living on the West Coast with a husband and baby at the time of Larissa's death at 32; at first, she was only told that she died in the bath. The author didn't know her friend was involved with heroin, so when that was revealed, a whole new set of painful, unanswerable questions emerged. "You know the obsessiveness—weeks spent poring over the minutiae of the days and hours prior to death, as if somewhere, hidden in plain sight, is the answer. Something you missed that could have prevented it all," she writes. So many of us fully understand this obsessiveness, and in sharing the specifics of hers, Carson strikes a deeply resonant chord.
As elegant and moving as a grief memoir can be.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781685890452
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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