A brightly crafted, overlong diversion.
How to make yourself lucky.
Seneca said it best: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” In this genial, upbeat overview, former Parade editor-in-chief Kaplan (The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life, 2015, etc.) and risk-taking expert Marsh offer stories of those lucky moments in the lives of countless people. “To get lucky, you have to be in a place where opportunities are going to be around you,” said Marsh in one of the authors’ regular weekly conversations, which drive the narrative. Kaplan, a veteran journalist, is often out conducting interviews with famous and successful (and lucky) people, and she compares notes with Marsh, who provides insights from his own risk-related work (as a visiting researcher at Princeton and Harvard), as well as other findings in psychology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Time and again, their stories find luck occurring at the intersection of “chance, talent, and hard work,” whether in the case of the young carpenter Harrison Ford, installing cabinets for movie director George Lucas and winding up in the movie American Graffiti; or of aspiring actress Charlize Theron, discovered by an agent during a screaming fit in a Los Angeles bank. “You make luck through other people”—witness Mother Teresa, who found that flying first class put her next to wealthy donors. Not to mention social media maven Sree Sreenivasan, the former chief digital officer at the Met Museum, who, when he lost that job, got word out to his followers and soon landed a better-paying position. In a long succession of feel-good stories, not always about the famous but often so—from Thomas Edison to Lee Child and Deepak Chopra—the authors illustrate how individuals managed successfully to place the constellations of good fortune in alignment. They are quick to note that you won’t get lucky sitting home watching TV.
A brightly crafted, overlong diversion.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98639-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
A timely, comprehensive, and often interesting argument that the most pressing issue the Middle East faces is not land and borders but rather the supply and distribution of the region's water. A soil scientist with extensive consulting experience throughout the world, Hillel (Plant and Soil Science/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; Out of the Earth, 1990) reveals how, in one of the world's most strategic and parched areas, ecological considerations, particularly concerning water supplies, may influence geopolitics as much as summit meetings, police forces, and arms build-ups. Hillel focuses on the region's four great rivers: the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Jordan. He shows how a 1967 dispute between Israel and Syria over water rights was a contributing cause to the Six-Day War; how Iraq and Syria nearly came to blows with Turkey in 1990 over distribution of water from the Euphrates; and how there has been considerable tension between Jordan and Saudi Arabia over an aquifer (a water-bearing layer of permeable rock and a rare geological feature in the arid Middle East) from which both desert kingdoms draw. Hillel also suggests ways that nations can avoid disputes through intercountry and regional agreements, and he proposes various means of increasing water supplies and assuring effective use—e.g., desalination, cloud seeding, drip irrigation, and improved transmission (pipeline leakage wastes fully half the water intended for some Middle Eastern cities). This is an impressively interdisciplinary study that combines insights from geology, archaeology, etymology, biblical and other ancient Near East studies, modern history, soil science, agronomy, ecology, and contemporary political analysis. At times, Hillel floods the reader with highly technical data that will interest only hydrologists or other specialists. Generally, however, this is a clearly written, often colorful, accessible, and useful work of regional studies.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508068-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
This academic exploration of female sexuality is marred by a facile categorization of feminists. Sexologist McCormick (Psychology/State Univ. of New York, Plattsburgh; Changing Boundaries: Gender Roles and Sexual Behavior, not reviewed) simplistically defines feminists as either ``Liberal'' or ``Radical.'' She constructs the former as focused on women's sexual pleasure and the latter as concerned with protecting girls and women from sexual abuse and exploitation. Placing her work as outside the typical model of sex research centered on white, middle-class heterosexual women, McCormick seeks to widen her readers' conception of female sexuality with her discussion of seduction, intimacy, lesbians and bisexuals, female sex-trade workers, pornography, and models of pleasure and fulfillment. She challenges the popular belief that sex should have orgasm as its goal, asserting that it denies many women their sexuality, especially those who are paralyzed or otherwise disabled. In the context of her research, McCormick encourages us to move beyond the ``dehumanizing [equation of] sexuality with genital juxtapositions and intercourse'' and to view sexuality as ``a whole body and whole mind experience.'' She is at her strongest in her explorations of women sex-trade workers, sexual victimization, and pornography; she advocates the legalization of prostitution and the creation of erotic material that affirms women's sexuality. Unfortunately, McCormick has a tendency to idealize women as more sentimental, affectionate, and desirous of intimacy than men. She sees female sexuality as almost spiritual, which leads her to make some extravagant generalizations. She suggests, for instance, that lesbians value intimacy more than sex, that loving lesbian relationships work better than gay or straight relationships, and while she lists the dangers faced by female participants in the sex-trade industry, she tends to glamorize their agency. A flawed but sometimes astute analysis of power and sexual relations.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-275-94359-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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