A useful and heartfelt guide to learning from a business executive’s mistakes.
An entrepreneur and addict shares the lessons he gleaned while getting his life back on track.
In this debut self-help book, Dash uses his experience with both addiction (gambling and drugs) and business (founding and running a company with international operations) as a case study in how to break bad habits, foster self-awareness, and develop a healthy attitude toward all aspects of life. His story is divided into themed chapters, each concluding with a “Lessons Learned” section that makes the readers’ takeaways explicit. The author explains how he spent years maintaining a successful facade, despite the financial and health challenges caused by his addictions, until he had a moment of epiphany and began to address the underlying issues in his life. With the help of supportive communities including Gamblers Anonymous and a collection of fellow entrepreneurs, Dash came to understand his troubled relationship with money, found positive results from cultivating a sense of “flow,” and decided that authenticity was one of his core values. But the path to self-awareness and stability was not a straight line, and the author’s openness about his backsliding (“Even though I stopped gambling, I made my situation worse with cross-addictions”) and frequent loss of perspective is one of the book’s strengths. The manual’s prescriptions are often standard elements of the self-help genre (“If you want results, you have to act when an opportunity for a new perspective presents itself”), but Dash’s engaging writing style makes him an effective messenger. Although the earnest volume deals more with personal growth than business topics, it effectively draws connections between problems in both spheres (“Enablers don’t just surround addicts; they can surround business people too”), giving readers clear opportunities to apply its lessons to their own lives. The author’s embrace of “flow” will please fans of the Law of Attraction (“I knew, living in flow, it would come together, and it did”), making the work most likely to appeal to readers of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. But even skeptics are likely to be won over by Dash’s endearing voice.
A useful and heartfelt guide to learning from a business executive’s mistakes.Pub Date: May 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0347-9
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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