A thorough and effective guide to establishing safe work environments.
A glove salesman offers advice for improving worker safety.
In this debut business book, Geng draws on his experience selling work gloves in a variety of industries to advocate for making employee safety a top priority. The volume reviews the reasons companies should take hand safety seriously. Geng then explains that safety is a matter of both having the right equipment and cultivating a strong corporate culture. The author guides readers through how to develop such a culture and evaluate progress toward keeping workers free from injuries on the job. He makes it clear that establishing a culture of safety requires a clear understanding of how employees do their jobs and the obstacles that make it difficult to practice safe habits, offering numerous suggestions for making concrete and actionable changes in the workplace. Geng is clearly knowledgeable about the intricacies of protective gloves, and readers without experience in the field will learn plenty about the subject. But the book’s real strength lies not in its narrow applicability to high-risk industries but in its approach to employer and worker psychology that has broad applicability in organizations of all kinds. Managers who will never encounter a conveyor belt or a vat of molten metal will find just as much useful information in the volume as those who work in those industries. The author explains how to understand the underlying causes of major problems—for instance, workers may fail to wear necessary protective equipment not because of laziness or ignorance but because they have been given gloves that provide padding while hampering movement. He shows how readers can effectively evaluate and respond to both the immediate and more fundamental causes of workplace problems. The book discusses the roles of empathy and effective communication in the workplace, particularly at the management level, and helps readers to understand and solve the problems caused when departments fail to communicate and have differing financial goals. While the volume does a good job of addressing hand safety specifically, its real value is much broader, as it is a comprehensive guide to developing safe and functional workplaces of all kinds.
A thorough and effective guide to establishing safe work environments.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0625-8
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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