A gripping memoir of motherly love and absolute devotion.
The chronicle of a mother’s increasingly desperate fight to preserve her son’s sanity.
Only a year after his difficult birth, Chase was diagnosed with global developmental delay. Davenport, the executive director of the University of North Carolina’s center for undergraduate excellence, writes movingly of her search for a diagnosis and cure. Newly married to an up-and-coming local rock star and struggling to become a novelist, her life had seemed happily on track. But following the diagnosis of global developmental delay, Chase was also diagnosed with severe ADHD and eventually autism. Two years later, he had his first grand mal seizure. Davenport’s marriage ended when her husband, whose rock band had dissolved, began to drink heavily and physically abuse Chase. (Years later she realized that even before this, her husband had showed signs of “the fluttering wing of paranoia.”) By age 15, Chase was in the grips of severe paranoia, convinced that he was being stalked by nailers, men who “nail you to the chair and kill you.” Even though he was highly medicated for epilepsy and psychosis, he was losing his fragile contact with reality and becoming so difficult to manage—he often threatened suicide—that he was hospitalized in a short-term residential-treatment facility. With the increasing doses of anti-psychotics, his condition continued to deteriorate. When he became violent and no longer recognized Davenport, she was informed that his prognosis was poor, and she needed to transfer him. After a harrowing search—and denial of further insurance coverage—she was forced to place him in a state mental hospital where he was drugged to the point of stupor. Finally, Chase was admitted to a small facility for young men with serious developmental disabilities; he slowly tapered off drugs and his condition steadily improved. Still, the author clearly understands that the battle is far from over. “I stopped seeing Chase as a child I just had to get back on track and saw him as he was,” she writes, “tall and painfully thin and unable to care for himself, unable to communicate, beset with the unseen, the unknown, the unnamable, but arrived into himself completely, as if all of this had been hardwired, preordained from the start.”
A gripping memoir of motherly love and absolute devotion.Pub Date: March 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56512-611-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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