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 rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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