Worthwhile guidance for women aiming for the corner office.
A Fortune 50 executive who climbed the corporate ladder shares how young women can replicate her professional success.
When debut author DeBok embarked on her career in the early 1990s, the business world was still very much a boys’ club. Through trial and error, she learned how to deal with an often hostile environment. Now, she “offers advice on how women can work within the male culture without abandoning female strengths such as collaboration, communication and empathy.” The book covers topics like overcoming perfectionism, learning how to lead and negotiate, managing emotions, and dealing with sexual harassment. Her belief is that women must bend to a male-dominated office culture (the “fitting in” of the title) while still using their stereotypically feminine traits—like strong communication skills—to do their jobs better and get ahead, thus “standing out” from their male peers. Some of the advice is not specific to women but applies to all people who are just starting out in their careers. Readers are sensibly urged to be punctual, prepare for meetings, and seize networking opportunities. DeBok also covers issues more pertinent to women, like negotiating salary, maintaining a professional appearance, handling flirtatious co-workers and their jealous wives, and even preparing for golf outings. Though not groundbreaking, the on-point guidance should be helpful for young women pursuing jobs in conservative, traditional companies. But those in less buttoned-up fields might find the author’s perspective a bit dated. The section on how to dress doesn’t address increasingly casual work environments where jeans and sneakers, not business suits, are the norm, nor does she discuss how to get ahead in an industry where the leaders are female, not male. Also absent is advice on a critical issue for many young women: balancing a career with starting a family. While there is general talk of work-life balance, DeBok is mum on topics like maternity leave and the pros and cons of taking time off to raise kids. But when it comes to the day-to-day business of navigating the working world, there are plenty of practical lessons here.
Worthwhile guidance for women aiming for the corner office.Pub Date: April 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9971927-0-4
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2017
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
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