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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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