A straightforward account that will appeal to CEOs, business bloggers, business students and professional women.
Mohn chronicles her story of being a fifth-generation member of the family-owned international media conglomerate Bertelsmann, a corporation with more than 100,000 employees in 50 countries.
The author began working for the Bertelsmann Book Club in the 1950s, and she became the protégé of Reinhold Mohn, head of the company and 20 years her senior. Though he was married, the couple had three children together and ultimately married in 1982. Mohn soon began taking on larger projects for the company, such as overseeing the construction of its headquarters. During the ’70s, the author became deeply involved with the Bertelsmann Foundation, which was designed to “work with specialists and with public and private institutions to develop projects.” Mohn has been instrumental in projects in the medical and health care fields and music and the arts, and she stresses the necessity of combining intuition with reason as the formula for success in business and life. The author also discusses the social responsibility of corporations, the role of women in the professional world, the differences between men and women in the workplace and the importance of combining family and work. She touches on globalization, migration, global warming and the debt crisis in Europe. For years, she writes, European leaders refused to confront the problems facing the European Union and purposely withheld information from citizens. “For me,” she writes, “the social unrest that is taking place in Greece and France is the precursor to serious social conflict.”
A straightforward account that will appeal to CEOs, business bloggers, business students and professional women.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3601-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Crown Business
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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