A frank and richly detailed manual that advises readers to have the courage to inject more compassion and positivity into...
A debut business-coaching guide focuses on kind, affirmative messages that too often go unspoken.
After a lifetime of working in the business world, both leading his own and others’ companies, Hutsell in his book concentrates on elements that are too often missing from similar self-help and motivation manuals: positive commentary and uplifting encounters. In both the personal and professional spheres, the author notes, it’s often far easier to concentrate on ambition or criticism than to have the bravery necessary to say nice things directly to people—rather than indirectly and too late. (The standard example is offering words at a eulogy that would have been far better said face to face.) Whether one is dealing with marriage partners, parents, co-workers, bosses, or teachers, the guide provides hypotheticals and specific breakdowns of how these interactions can harden in their usage and crowd out what the author refers to as “Fundamental Questions”: “How am I doing with you?” and “What does that mean for me?” Hutsell’s main point is that the caring, more empathetic interactions too many people neglect are the lifeblood of improved relationships—and the source of inevitable regrets, reflected in a pertinent quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” In an appealingly personal strand running through the volume, Hutsell uses stories of his own regrets in his past relationships to illuminate the many ways people fail to appreciate the power of words in family and professional interactions. “We all remember our best boss,” he writes at one point. “But how many of us have ever told them?” Through tales and examples, the guide outlines tactics for seizing this type of missed opportunity and actually telling people they’re valued. The open, confessional tone maintained throughout should make the book’s unconventional message widely inviting.
A frank and richly detailed manual that advises readers to have the courage to inject more compassion and positivity into daily conversations.Pub Date: July 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63183-310-6
Page Count: 173
Publisher: BookLogix
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
