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
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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