A book for serious candidates for the executive ranks.
A penetrating survey of the mindset, skills, traits and behaviors needed to become an executive in any organization.
In a genre filled with books with catchy titles, simplistic metaphors and prescriptive formulas, this debut business book takes a different approach. Saye, a technology executive for a global services company, offers a straightforward title and 10 densely written chapters probing many facets of the executive experience. Three chapters cover topics for managers aspiring to the executive level, and five explore the challenges that new junior executives face and the responses they’ll need to succeed; the final two chapters focus on how junior executives may rise to senior leadership. Each chapter contains about 10 subheadings, with 100 topics in all; many are conventional, such as “Project Management” or “Vision and Mission,” but others take imaginative turns, such as “Pastoral Thinking” and “Credibility Judo.” Saye summarizes each topic effectively in a boldface coda beginning “The Junior Executive will…,” as in, “The Junior Executive will organize all domain activities into portfolios that can be led by lieutenants.” The author’s overall premise is that most management books fail to bridge the chasm between theory and practice and that preparing for the executive role should be as rigorous as performing it. Using real-life examples, Saye’s writing carries an air of experience and authority, but this isn’t an easy read, nor is it intended to be. The book has a tendency toward wordiness, often restating the same things in different ways, but this technique allows Saye to introduce new concepts generally and then drill down to finer meanings. He also assumes that readers are already familiar with some management theories and authors, so beginners beware. Suggested readings include standards like Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and Carl von Clausewitz’s On War but also works less often cited in management books, such as Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and Franz Kafka’s The Castle. Overall, Saye presents the path to executive leadership as a highly philosophical, individualized program of self-development and a quest that requires significant introspection.
A book for serious candidates for the executive ranks.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0988210202
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Saye Global LLC.
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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