Accessible, compassionate business and life advice from a prominent queer corporate leader.
A veteran executive shares the formative events that shaped his successful business career.
Through an effective combination of anecdotes, personal history, and memories, Fielding, born in 1965 in Toledo, Ohio, reflects on his life and exemplary career achievements. The author’s mother was an alcoholic, and despite his father becoming detached from the situation, both parents instilled in their son the importance of hard work. From his early youth, Fielding recalls acknowledging his homosexual identity, but he resisted embracing it, considering surgery to deepen his voice and even suicide. “I prayed for change,” he writes, and “shoved my feelings down.” Eventually, however, he accepted himself as a “complicated unicorn” and went on to overachieve in school to prove he was just as good as his straight peers. A self-described “Type-A, compulsive, and overzealous control freak,” the author launched his retail career with a post-collegiate department store stint followed by positions at Gap, Inc. in San Francisco. “For a little gay boy from Toledo, San Francisco was Disneyland or Oz,” he writes. “It only existed in dreams and movies.” He continued on to upper management jobs at Lands’ End, Disney, Claire’s, and Dreamworks, where he was global head of consumer products and further developed a leadership philosophy fostering curiosity, learning skills, and, above all, acceptance of the changing realities of the corporate landscape. Employing a sincere, affable tone, Fielding addresses many issues involving social justice, and he never masks his increasing frustration with the politicization of the queer community’s struggle. He also shares an emotional segment about caring for his mother as she dealt with early stage dementia. Throughout this encouraging book, Fielding inspires leaders of all sizes and colors to embrace diversity, build community, and use intuition to fight against social injustice and intolerance. The author is also realistic: “While some days are better than others, the fight is truly never over.”
Accessible, compassionate business and life advice from a prominent queer corporate leader.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781394165285
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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