A stirring, revelatory program for rethinking and reorganizing your life.
A step-by-step breakdown of key personal motivators and how they can be combined for individual—perhaps even global—fulfillment.
Campbell’s nonfiction debut is openly spiritual and Christian in its groundings. “[T]here is never a time you are not with God,” he writes. “God is always with you and you know it.” Yet in elaborating on his perspectives of personal responsibility and fulfillment, his approach is not only straightforward but almost entirely nondenominational. “What we are and how we behave affects our family, friends, and acquaintances,” he writes, adding that all of us from presidents to CEOs to street people have the potential to influence thousands of other people in the course of our lives. As he simply puts it, “[W]e shape our world.” Campbell identifies five “core drivers” in the human emotional makeup, and he views the perfecting of these core drivers as the essential ingredient in achieving what he calls “Oneness”—a kind of maximized potential, both individual and collective. Pointing out that “our collective vehicle has stalled,” he’s frank about how far modern society has fallen from any kind of Oneness, but his confidence in human perfectibility remains upbeat throughout the book. “Love is stronger than fear,” he writes, Campbell “joy is more attractive than misery.” In the book’s signature assertion, he says: “[O]ur best at any given time can be astounding.” Campbell compares these humanist declarations with the kind of cutthroat thinking prevalent in today’s business world, that winner-take-all attitude he views as empty posturing. “Deep within and beyond all the threats and bravado,” he believes, “no one is a mean and hard-nosed negotiator.” He returns frequently to accounts of his own personal religious faith, and although he says that “we have a natural connection with God at birth,” he maintains a flexible, fluid approach to personal growth, one that warns against dogmatism of any kind—an attitude that should appeal equally to nonbelievers. His explorations of human potential might be inspired by God, but they don’t require one.
A stirring, revelatory program for rethinking and reorganizing your life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Core Driver Press
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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