Valuable encouragement to closeted workers who can afford to heed the author’s advice.
An appeal to LGBT workers and corporations about the benefits of inclusion, from the former CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Riverstone Holdings partner Browne (Seven Elements that Changed the World, 2014, etc.) resigned from BP in 2007 following a scandal that exposed his long-hidden sexuality. Living a double life destroyed his career, and he cautions others not to make his mistake. After a lengthy, needless primer on the history of homosexuality, the author focuses on the sphere of his fellow white-collar professionals; in 2012, there were no openly gay CEOs in the Fortune 500, and (presumably) straight white men held almost 75 percent of all boardroom seats. Brown also reports that an estimated 41 percent of LGBT employees in the United States are in the closet. He believes businesses should seek to employ "the best people, everywhere, on the single criterion of merit” and urges them to demonstrate to employees that coming out will not be "catastroph[ic]…regardless of their sector or the protections in place at their company.” The author glosses over the fact that this will be the case for rank-and-file employees in companies, and countries, hostile to gays. Browne effectively presents both leadership lessons and workers' stories of how the closet has hurt their dignity and careers. An out senior banker at HSBC warns, "[a]t some point if you're not truthful about certain elements of your personal life it becomes a huge liability….People won't trust you and may even use it against you." If this book fails to inspire risk-averse business leaders, it will reassure gay workers that "kowtowing to those who disapprove of your sexuality suggests their comfort is more important than your own. It is not." Browne further urges them to take responsibility: "If a company opens the closet door, it is up to the employee to walk through it.”
Valuable encouragement to closeted workers who can afford to heed the author’s advice.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-231697-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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