Berry presents his positive plan for life and career transformation.
As a business leader who has worked globally for Fortune 500 companies, Berry now uses his communication skills to head his own business specializing in executive coaching and leadership development. However, this brisk guide is not only for the business-minded, as anyone needing to break out of a job rut can benefit from the author’s reader-friendly advice. Quoting Albert Einstein’s famous “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result,” Berry doesn’t give simplistic solutions; instead, he prompts readers to overcome negative mental barriers and achieve full life and career potential. The book is clearly divided by chapter into eight principles, beginning with “Why Change?” and culminating in “Creating Opportunities for Success.” Each chapter ends with questions, or “thought stimulators,” to encourage self-evaluation. For example, those who are unsure of a career path can review a list of 377 personal values (consistency, assertiveness, etc.) in the book’s appendix—ultimately the list should be narrowed to four major values as part of an exercise to help determine personal job compatibility. A chapter on networking suggests easily implemented ideas for maintaining professional relationships; e.g., using technology to connect with others or remembering special events like birthdays. The author also discusses the powerful concept of product branding and how to utilize advertising concepts for “personal rebranding.” Berry’s voice is affecting as he encourages readers to have an open mind and embrace new perspectives. He demonstrates an engaging passion for his work; during two-year negotiations on behalf of an American company that wished to purchase a Turkish company, Berry made an effort to learn the Turkish culture, and when he brought prayer beads to a meeting, the Turkish company’s otherwise stern patriarch was pleased and deal was struck. Some of the book’s questions are reminiscent of a college career day, but Berry gives fresh, modern insight for those who desire to make changes for the better. An inspirational tool for personal and professional growth.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1432756420
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Outskirts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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