A well-crafted instructional tale that explores gender in corporate America.
An aging CEO tries to stem the flow of female talent away from her California company in this novel.
Debra is the co-founder and CEO of a Santa Monica–based tech firm. Sales are down, and people are jumping ship, including her star CPO, Natalie. Debra knows how hard the business world can be for women, but at age 60, she’s afraid she may be losing touch: “Debra had been feeling for some time that there was a generational gap; that she didn’t understand the concerns raised by some of the rising senior women….Natalie was the fourth senior woman in the past year to depart. The other three had also been on the younger side of the leadership team.” It’s especially frustrating for Debra because she’s worked so hard to promote women to leadership positions. Things don’t improve when Debra passes over Natalie’s preferred successor, Amber, senior director of product development, to bring in a man from the outside. Sales continue to fall. Debra can sense a crisis brewing, but she doesn’t know how to stop it. There is more holding back the young women around her than a simple lack of confidence—more than can just be solved by “leaning in.” To figure out how to save the company, Debra will have to listen to the young women still around: people like the frustrated Amber, who is secretly scheduling interviews; Debra’s new mentee, Cassandra, with whom she’s struggling to click; and even Kyle, a younger male manager who sees the flaws of many of his male colleagues. But can an old dog like Debra learn new tricks, even ones she wants to learn? Can she turn around her company before her investors rebel? Written with the express purpose of dramatizing the issues that many companies face concerning female engagement and leadership representation, the book attempts to get at the problems that persist despite the fact that everyone seems to want to solve them.
Ho’s prose is subtle and taut, as here, where she describes a tense work lunch: “Amber’s hands were beneath the table, but she was studying the menu as if it were the most riveting laminated sheet in the world. Her eyes were currently fixed on the meats page, even though she was a vegetarian. Sometimes Debra wished it didn’t always fall on her to break the ice in uncomfortable situations.” The story isn’t so compelling that it would satisfy readers with no interest in restructuring a corporate work environment, but it is much better than it has to be. For a novel with such overtly didactic purposes, the interpersonal dramas are well drawn and compelling. The author captures the way that colleagues interact: invariably polite on the surface while simmering underneath. What’s more, it makes Ho’s points in a way that a normal, prescriptive work of nonfiction could not. The characters easily embody the various perspectives, and they help readers see the situation from outside the blinkered viewpoint of a CEO. The result is an engaging evolution of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” mantra.
A well-crafted instructional tale that explores gender in corporate America.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-95-410600-0
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Strategic Imagination
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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