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
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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