Wise, thoughtful, and valuable, this book will foster a new appreciation for effective leadership and prompt many readers to...
The making of “five unforgettable leaders who lived, worked, struggled, and triumphed in different circumstances toward different ends.”
In this engaging, unusually rewarding book, historian Koehn (Harvard Business School; The Story of American Business: From the Pages of the New York Times, 2009, etc.) examines the lives and skills of individuals who overcame “profound” personal crises to achieve important goals. Her striking choice of leaders—British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, President Abraham Lincoln, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and environmental writer Rachel Carson—provides many ways of seeing how vastly different challenges can summon inner strengths that allow certain individuals to motivate others to great purposes. Leaders are made, not born, argues the author. In these perceptive sketches, she shows how these leaders “made themselves into people of character and strength capable of doing extraordinary things.” The disciplined Shackleton led his ice-locked crew to survival (“Not a life lost and we have been through Hell”); Lincoln, ever resilient, saved the Union; ex-slave Douglass became a powerful voice for abolition; Bonhoeffer brought intense focus to his opposition to the Nazis; and Carson overcame illness and many other obstacles to exert quiet leadership against pesticide use and other environmental issues. Without interrupting her narratives, Koehn offers comments on the lessons for today’s leaders and teases out significant traits shared by her subjects: “the harder they worked on themselves, the more effective they became as leaders.” All had a talent for “looking widely, listening carefully, and reflecting constantly.” With consistency, all managed their emotions in the most turbulent moments. Throughout, Koehn underscores the great humanity and depth of understanding of these leaders, from Shackleton’s ministering to the smallest needs of his men to Bonhoeffer’s empathy for the oppressed and powerless.
Wise, thoughtful, and valuable, this book will foster a new appreciation for effective leadership and prompt many readers to lament the lack of it in the world today.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7444-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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