A feisty, real-world guide to getting ahead in corporate America.
A savvy corporate worker shares her secrets of success.
Debut author Jones fell into the corporate world by accident. After graduating from high school, she worked a variety of menial jobs in Denver. She moved to Chicago in 1984 at age 22 for what she thought would be a short-term stint; her aunt worked for an insurance company there that offered a $300 referral fee, and she convinced Jones to try out for a temporary file-clerk spot. The author didn’t want the gig, and did all she could to sabotage the interview, including wearing ripped clothing. To her surprise, however, she got the job; a manager said, “She’s here. We need someone today. It’s temporary. How bad could it be?” Thus began Jones’ corporate career in which she “clawed [her] way up” to various higher-level positions in the insurance industry, eventually also earning her bachelor’s degree. In this memoir, she offers a host of cynical yet practical navigation tips for other go-getters, using her own experiences to illustrate her points. She outlines how to leverage entry-level jobs (including when to read other people’s mail and what to do with that information), how to take down your competition (she once called a headhunter while pretending to be a colleague, leading to the latter’s exit) and how to spot the “weak gazelles”—less-threatening colleagues to bring with you in your ascent. However, her tales of helping such colleagues seem more benevolent than self-interested, and readers may suspect that she achieved what she did largely by being a smart, hard worker instead of a Machiavellian power player. Overall, the book seems more interested in money and power than it is in the insurance industry. However, the author’s energy and ambition is infectious, and her proclamation at the end of this book (“I have a little less than twenty years left in this industry, and I plan to make every day count”) may prove inspirational to striving workers everywhere.
A feisty, real-world guide to getting ahead in corporate America.Pub Date: March 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0989663809
Page Count: 196
Publisher: B I C Book Publications
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2014
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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