A solipsistic memoir of student government service.
Johnson details how his college years shaped him into a student leader in this motivational memoir.
When the New Jerseyan author arrived at Marist College in upstate New York in 2009, he was a shy, anxious, pessimistic freshman who wouldn’t have struck many people as student-government material. He had, in fact, unsuccessfully run for office several times in high school. Even so, Johnson writes, he knew that he wanted to be a member of the Marist student government from the first moment he saw the student-body president give a presentation: “My ears perked up once again as the regal figure before the mic promised that ‘someone in this room’ would, one day, take up his mantle as the chief representative of the student body.” The book chronicles Johnson’s four-year rise through the college’s Student Government Association, during which time he reinvented himself as a confident, ambitious, and outgoing campus personality. Through successes, disappointments, and local crises (such as Hurricane Sandy), Johnson transformed into a true leader, going on to pursue a career in local government in Montville Township, New Jersey, following his 2013 graduation. This memoir also serves as a manual on how to become a better leader, as each chapter of Johnson’s story concludes with a “Lessons Learned” section regarding each experience that he describes (“I can certainly say that my sophomore term was the most transformative period of my undergraduate career”). The author then offers Leadership Profile Exercises, which he encourages readers to complete in order to better fulfill their own leadership potential. Johnson’s account of the convoluted 2011 class elections is oddly compelling from a procedural perspective. Also, his unflaggingly optimistic tone makes him a pleasant narrator. However, he’s not always a captivating one. Although his experiences in student government were surely influential on his own personal development, nothing in his accounts of life in college or afterward is terribly exciting. The reading experience is akin to having someone take you on a tour of a college campus that you didn’t go to yourself; you can tell that they’re excited and nostalgic about it—but you’re not. Even so, one could still imagine a book like this possessing a certain precocious charm, but this narrative instead feels more like an extended personal essay for a law school application, with prose that often seems overwrought. The text’s relentless self-seriousness also doesn’t help matters. For example, for those readers who may be wondering why the 20-something author didn’t wait a bit longer to pen his memoirs, the author front-loads this retort: “the sands of time...wipe away a certain emotional edge that holds the finer details in which one might find underlying motivations for certain decisions and courses of action.” That said, he doesn’t recount any decisions or courses of action that really require very much in the way of explanation. The genre of leadership memoirs is vast and deep, and readers looking for tips will be able to find more experienced and accomplished guides.
A solipsistic memoir of student government service.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 317
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2017
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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