A personal story about traveling a long road to empowerment and self-sufficiency.
One woman recounts her rags-to-riches journey.
Pizano grew up poor in a tough South Side Chicago neighborhood, and eventually became an unhappy trophy wife before becoming a confident, self-sufficient woman with her own entertainment company. Her early years were spent surrounded by strong, loving family members who taught her to always try to find her “yes” in whatever she wanted to pursue. Her first lesson, she says, came after hearing her mother speak of sexual molestation she endured as a child—an event that eventually prompted her mother to start a nonprofit to help missing and abused children. Pizano’s mother told her that when something bad happens, one has two choices: play the victim, or do something about it. During her nomadic life with her mother, Pizano had her own share of challenges, including a very serious motorcycle accident that derailed her plan to become a model in California. It set her on a path to the financial industry and the man she would eventually marry. However, she says, she found that her husband’s family expressed little love or empathy—a burden that she had to bear in her own marriage. She relates how she fought to keep her sense of self as she became an isolated woman—a situation that only worsened with a move to Memphis. Using the stiletto as a metaphor for finding one’s voice, courage, and perseverance through tough, emotional times, Pizano effectively writes of her difficult life in this memoir. She recounts her journey in a straightforward manner throughout, and readers who have been through similar situations, such as a difficult divorce or sharing custody, may find her story relatable. Some of the sections in this book read more like diary entries, such as late chapters regarding her business dealings. Overall, however, it’s an intriguing, motivational memoir that may assist others as they attempt to regain their own power.
A personal story about traveling a long road to empowerment and self-sufficiency.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4525-8668-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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