A mix of Napoleon Hill and Napoleon Bonaparte—or Lee Ermey, anyway—that doesn’t quite mesh.
A business-leadership manifesto full of gung-ho bluster along with a few useful pointers.
Mr. Grenade is not your friend: The old Army saying is true, but it’s an admonition that translates only metaphorically to civilian life. Marines (for there’s no ex-Marine, it’s said) Warren and Thompson try a few such metaphors, and they make for often awkward fits. The authors take some of their business pointers from their own experiences running a real estate finance firm (and now chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of cryptocurrency), peppering those pointers with sometimes-gruesome scenes from firefights and violent ambushes in Iraq. Mix up the two, and here’s what you get: “At the end of the day, we would kill fifty to one hundred insurgents without losing a single Marine. How did we do it? While we had some good fortune, the key factor was the leadership choices, discipline, and habits we’d developed over months and years.” For all the battlefront bravado, the authors offer some helpful advice. Just as Marines favor someone with the right mindset for combat and the willingness to learn, they counsel, bosses shouldn’t worry overmuch about a high-ticket college degree or even a degree at all, and the authors’ urging would-be leaders to “do everything for a reason” is worth keeping in mind. Still, there’s a certain sameness to every business and self-help book by former Delta Force gunners, SEALs, snipers, and, yes, Marines. For all the talk of speaking bluntly, clarifying the mission, allowing decision-making to take place at the lowest echelons, and being last in line at the mess hall, this one doesn’t really stand out above pack.
A mix of Napoleon Hill and Napoleon Bonaparte—or Lee Ermey, anyway—that doesn’t quite mesh.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780063264373
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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