A nice variety of perspectives on the pleasures and perils of excess.
Diverse reflections on substance abuse and society in 23 sharply fashioned testimonies.
“What once was viewed as a shocking moral deficiency is now increasingly seen as a tragic vulnerability,” comments editor Shannonhouse (Out of Her Mind, 2000), who supports this assertion by selecting texts from both the addict’s point of view and that of society. Excerpts from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) was one of the first accounts of Western drug use, and Sigmund Freud’s earnest inquiry, The Cocaine Papers, remind us that 19th-century society was fairly tolerant of controlled substance use. By contrast, in his 1891 essay on “The Ethics of Wine-Drinking and Tobacco-Smoking,” Leo Tolstoy argues persuasively (if verbosely) that “the universal habit of consuming hashish, opium, wine, and tobacco . . . is, beyond all doubt, highly pernicious [and] fraught with terrible evils.” Early-20th-century entries, including “How Children are Made Drunkards” and “The Enemy” (a 1909 tale of a woman’s morphine addiction), take an even more moralistic tone. Their lugubrious air is lightened by O. Henry’s barbed “Let Me Feel Your Pulse,” which transforms the cynical narrator’s alcoholism into hallucinatory prose, and by the mordant insider’s perspective offered in “A Bartender Tells What Man Did to Booze and Booze to Man.” Familiar pieces by literary figures include Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde,” John Cheever’s “The Sorrows of Gin,” and excerpts from Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs, and The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley. Not all the addictive behavior explored is chemical: in a selection from Double Down, Stephen and Frederick Barthelme ruefully chronicle runaway gambling, while a jagged excerpt of Sue Silverman’s memoir Love Sick dissects the sexual addict’s compulsion to sleep with strangers. In the final piece, “Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater,” a lonely father reconnects with his delinquent son via the drug and rails against current punitive restrictions on adult pursuit of sensation and enlightenment.
A nice variety of perspectives on the pleasures and perils of excess.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-75716-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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