A pleasant but familiar and sometimes-spacey take on common self-improvement themes.
Consultants Desiderio and Frino, the authors of The Beekeeper(2023), offer a starry-eyed tale that connects nature, business, and personal growth.
Inspired by “the energy from our star system,” visits to wolf sanctuaries and wilderness trails, and the work of astronomers, this book is an upbeat, self-described “leadership fable” focused on “unleashing the brilliance of building brighter teams.” In it, Jack, a small winery owner, meets Grayce, an astronomer and teacher. Jack has doubts about his business and struggles to define his personal concepts of purpose and growth. On a retreat at a state park, Grayce introduces him to the “star system”—the celestial bodies that the book uses as a metaphor for how to build a supportive network and embrace one’s curiosity and sense of connectedness. From chapter to chapter (each with partially italicized titles such as “Starburst” and “Lodestar”), Jack and Grayce stargaze and have meandering conversations about work, nature, and their pasts. Jack writes in his journal about how to “be brilliant” and his thoughts on plants and the natural world, interpolating facts he learns from signs posted in the park. He begins to reevaluate his challenges and apply lessons from astronomy and the environment to his leadership style. Thanks to his conversations with Grayce and a series of others, he begins to see setbacks as opportunities for growth, and parallels between the stars and his relationships. Desiderio and Frino’s bookworks well as a companion on a self-help journey, as it’s as cozy and reassuring as a glass of red wine while lounging by a firepit. However, some koanlike passages, such as “sometimes in the dark we need the light of the moon to illuminate the path forward,” may strike some readers as too far out to be effective advice. The book touches on common personal and professional challenges, and tries to share actionable advice about resilience, connectedness, and pursuing greatness. That said, its major insight—that focusing on human connection and fostering a “growth mindset” can transform one’s business—will already be well known to most readers.
A pleasant but familiar and sometimes-spacey take on common self-improvement themes.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781394280537
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
