by Paul Estes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 2020
Illuminating and forward-thinking; demonstrates how to leverage gig workers for time-saving life tasks.
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A veteran of big tech extols the virtues of the gig economy.
Estes, who held a senior position at Microsoft, uses this lively debut as a soapbox for a kind of career–personal life equilibrium he says can be achieved through adopting a “Gig Mindset.” If the gig economy is “fundamentally changing the world of work,” then the Gig Mindset “changes the way we work forever,” writes the author, who advocates employing “on-demand experts to reclaim our time.” Estes discovered the value of relying on talented freelance professionals to get things done, and it revolutionized his life. He cleverly developed a process to take full advantage of the gig economy that he calls “The T.I.D.E. Model: Taskify, Identify, Delegate, and Evolve.” Using engaging, motivational text supplemented by examples primarily from his own experience, the author walks readers through these four elements in detail. Of great interest are the excerpts of interviews he conducted with a panel of five senior executives, each of whom provides commentary that enriches and shapes the Gig Mindset conversation. T.I.D.E. itself is an intriguing concept; still, each of the four elements has intrinsic value that applies to business management in general. For example, Estes discusses a concept he calls “radical delegation,” which involves setting expectations, developing timelines, and trusting others to execute tasks. He offers seven specific steps he recommends for practicing effective delegation. Regarding the need to think differently, GE executive Dyan Finkhousen tells Estes: “The truth is that engaging with gig resources required an evolution of our own mindsets and behaviors.” The author wraps up the book with some key observations by his panelists and himself about negative perceptions surrounding the gig economy. Tucker Max, bestselling author and co-founder of a publishing service called Scribe Media, says about the myth implying freelancers are subpar: “That people are freelance because they can’t get a full-time job. It’s nonsense….In fact, we find overall the freelance pool to be far higher talent than the people applying” for full-time jobs. Two appendices—gig-related tasks for business and home—are useful additions.
Illuminating and forward-thinking; demonstrates how to leverage gig workers for time-saving life tasks.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0632-6
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
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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