A debut guide to networking targets readers who hate the practice.
Thanks to her early years accompanying her professionally itinerant father, Patterson came to think of herself as the “Professional New Girl” who was always dealing with a fresh environment where she knew nobody. She’d gone from New Jersey to the Dallas suburbs, “where old money mingled with new and my classmates popped the collars on their Ralph Lauren Polos and cuffed the hems of their madras plaid Bermuda shorts before they left for the country club.” The years of needing to make new ties and friends shaped her, she later realized, into “a natural connector,” somebody who was still “painfully, tragically uncomfortable walking into a room full of strangers” but who could nonetheless do it and triumph. In the course of her chatty and smoothly involving book, she lays out a series of pithy observations and tips for people in the business world who face the prospect of networking with less confidence than a “Professional New Girl.” In a series of easily flowing chapters, she focuses on some of the ways people navigate networking events incorrectly or poorly. Effective networking is about far more than shaking hands and passing out business cards, she asserts: It’s about building relationships based on genuine respect and affection. “It’s hard to connect with people when you’re unhappy, and it’s damn near impossible to connect with people when you don’t like and respect them,” she writes. “Because (ahem!) we do business with people we know, like, and trust.” Throughout the personable guide, Patterson adopts a tone of jocular chiding combined with helpful pragmatism (sections are anchored with a series of “Prompts and Activities” to help readers codify her valuable suggestions). Readers who’ve dreaded networking or been frustrated by failures will no doubt discover some of their errors pointedly probed here, which may be uncomfortable. But they will also find an enormous amount of worthy advice in these pages.
A fun and demystifying manual that seeks to humanize networking.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-43847-4
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Two Chickens Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Noted jazz and pop record producer Thiele offers a chatty autobiography. Aided by record-business colleague Golden, Thiele traces his career from his start as a ``pubescent, novice jazz record producer'' in the 1940s through the '50s, when he headed Coral, Dot, and Roulette Records, and the '60s, when he worked for ABC and ran the famous Impulse! jazz label. At Coral, Thiele championed the work of ``hillbilly'' singer Buddy Holly, although the only sessions he produced with Holly were marred by saccharine strings. The producer specialized in more mainstream popsters like the irrepressibly perky Teresa Brewer (who later became his fourth wife) and the bubble-machine muzak-meister Lawrence Welk. At Dot, Thiele was instrumental in recording Jack Kerouac's famous beat- generation ramblings to jazz accompaniment (recordings that Dot's president found ``pornographic''), while also overseeing a steady stream of pop hits. He then moved to the Mafia-controlled Roulette label, where he observed the ``silk-suited, pinky-ringed'' entourage who frequented the label's offices. Incredibly, however, Thiele remembers the famously hard-nosed Morris Levy, who ran the label and was eventually convicted of extortion, as ``one of the kindest, most warm-hearted, and classiest music men I have ever known.'' At ABC/Impulse!, Thiele oversaw the classic recordings of John Coltrane, although he is the first to admit that Coltrane essentially produced his own sessions. Like many producers of the day, Thiele participated in the ownership of publishing rights to some of the songs he recorded; he makes no apology for this practice, which he calls ``entirely appropriate and without any ethical conflicts.'' A pleasant, if not exactly riveting, memoir that will be of most interest to those with a thirst for cocktail-hour stories of the record biz. (25 halftones, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-19-508629-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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