An affirmative, spirited prescription for coping in a post-pandemic world.
A guide offers inspiration for life after Covid-19.
As a result of the pandemic, internationally known motivational speaker Kim saw her face-to-face business evaporate. Instead of surrendering, she conceived of four formulas to make “order out of chaos.” This book explores her “Reboot Formulas,” explains how to write a “Reboot Scenario,” and discusses how to survive in a post-pandemic world. The author begins with a pragmatic overview of the universal impact of Covid-19 on everyday life. She subsequently describes the four formulas, illustrating how she applied them to her own business as well as providing solid examples from other companies. The first two formulas revolve around transitioning from in-person to online communications and accepting the broader goal of digital transformation. Kim not only drove this metamorphosis in her business, she understood that the digital data she acquired about customers could be used to segment and personalize products and services. The third formula recognizes the way in which the pandemic has changed the relationship between employee and employer, creating the “Independent Worker.” The author believes millennials in particular have embraced working independently. Still, she perceptively thinks the workplace is changing, resulting in the need for everyone to consider becoming independent employees. In discussing the fourth formula, “Safety,” Kim accurately cites her native South Korea’s world-leading response to the pandemic: “The choice that Koreans made, even if it required loss and sacrifice, ended up saving Korea and its being acknowledged as an advanced country when it came to safety.” A particularly instructive portion of the book is the detailed, three-stage approach the author proposes for writing a reboot scenario, followed by her enthusiastic encouragement to become “a chaser,” someone who realizes it is never too late to take the first step toward a goal. Kim’s strong emphasis on self-education as well as learning from others is a critical part of a successful reboot. The author closes the manual on a philosophical note: “We may have lost everything but not ourselves.” Consistently positive throughout, Kim delivers wise, motivational words and actionable strategies for moving forward.
An affirmative, spirited prescription for coping in a post-pandemic world.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-54-452137-4
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
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