A generally engaging, if overly pat, leadership guide from an experienced commander.
A retired U.S. Navy admiral shares dozens of leadership stories in this debut self-help manual.
In a nonfiction work aimed at helping readers reach their full potential, Manazir first assures them that they’re likely already involved in leadership: “If you have one employee relying on your lead, you are a leader,” he writes. “If you are a grandparent and you have grandchildren observing your every move, you are a leader.” The author relates several stories about times in his own career in which he confronted leadership challenges, and then he draws lessons from them. “I want to inspire you to get back up from your defeats,” he writes, “mark the moment, learn a valuable and life-changing lesson, and then continue on your quest to lead and win.” Manazir relates anecdotes from many periods of his long career, including his nervousness over being admitted to the Naval Academy in the 1970s and his bruising experiences during SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training, and he threads in specific pieces of advice along the way: “You cannot always control the outcome, but you can always control your attitude,” “learn to be a team player,” or “be clear on the why of the vision and the why of the mission,” are just a few terse examples. Overall, Manazir’s writing is vigorous and passionate. However, experienced readers of motivational literature will find this book’s bromides to be very familiar. There’s also a frustrating sense that these yarns from the author’s 36 years of service could have yielded more pointed advice than, for instance, “think ahead.” Nevertheless, his strong reminder to readers—that if they have any kind of influence, they’re a leader—will have value to those who may feel powerless.
A generally engaging, if overly pat, leadership guide from an experienced commander.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 209
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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