An engaging, albeit imbalanced, discussion of the psychology and application of trust building.
Author of four previous books, poet and positive psychologist Meehan (Hall Ways to Success and Significance, 2014, etc.) explores the origins and meanings of two promises that have guided his life work as an organizational relationship consultant.
Born in the same Liverpool hospital and in the same year as Beatle Sir Paul McCartney, the author of this semi-autobiography relates the stories of his early aversion to violence as well as the various mentors who guided him. Almost by chance, Meehan discovered the two guiding principles, the two mantras (“I mean you no harm” and “I seek your greatest good”), that so perfectly encapsulate his deep, abiding interest in building trusting relationships, which is the focus of his book. Meehan’s encounter and subsequent deep professional relationship with Dr. William Hall—a positive psychologist and developer of highly structured organizational interviewing techniques—changed the author’s life. Meehan joined Hall’s firm, Talent Plus, in Lincoln, Nebraska. “Bill invested in relationships as intensely as financial brokers invest in shares on the stock exchange,” he writes of Hall’s preoccupation with building solid bonds of trust with others. The book then explores relationship building through RSVP, an acronym Meehan developed to show the importance of developing strong personal relationships, investing in strengths, allowing vision and virtue to guide one’s actions, and adopting a positive approach to experience. Meehan then examines the meaning of trust in the context of the two sentences that comprise the book’s title. While this shifting organizational landscape may seem to impose structural challenges, the author proves adept at applying various approaches to his central theme. His interest in Aristotle, the Stoics, and other philosophers enriches the discussion. A fairly strong writer, Meehan ends his exploration with a number of his poems—an unfortunate choice. Cloyingly saccharine, the rhymed verse detracts from the earnest exposition established in earlier sections: “Continue to live your life for many years more. / You’ll live to be a hundred—that’s for sure! / And please remember while you do, / John, Jim, Stephen and Margaret will always love you.”
An engaging, albeit imbalanced, discussion of the psychology and application of trust building.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-6149-6
Page Count: 216
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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