Insightful, encouraging, and universally practical.
A New York Times business reporter shares her wisdom on creating and completing that elusive back-burner dream project.
Korkki’s debut, a crisply written meditation on goal achievement, was spurred by an ambitious article she’d written on deadlines. Though the overall process of penning the book was “rough and halting” and the idea had been gestating for decades, it evolved into a learning process for an author plagued by laziness, procrastination, and a barrage of distractions. She shares her personal journey through charming anecdotes and notes on preparatory self-care and via an extensive collective of interviews with psychotherapists, who coach aging adults on their goals; neuroscientists, who study cognitive decline in the middle-aged; dream-interpreting psychoanalysts; and a Jamaican reggae artist who recorded his first full-length album at age 65. Korkki also shares her own path of bringing the book to publication, including the climbing of a mountain with a Mayo Clinic physician. Naturally, she writes, a steely sense of focus, consistent motivation, commitment, and patience are key, but roadblocks like imperfection, self-doubt, and uncertainty are also very much a reality. “Each person who works on a Big Thing experiences limits that can be accepted and also harnessed,” writes Korkki. “Even if the limits seem to be negative, they can be transformed into something positive.” Hopeful and inspirational, the author profiles extraordinary people making their own aspirations a reality while battling addiction or physical and mental disabilities. The book is grounded in the cultivation of self-confidence and empowerment, and these elements are paramount particularly for an older generation wishing to leave a commemorative legacy in their wake (“the resolve of generativity”). With a supportive tone and gentle but insistent nudging, Korkki urges readers to creatively seize their own great endeavor as it can prove “one of the best ways to connect with the world.”
Insightful, encouraging, and universally practical.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-238430-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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