A compelling topic that’s hampered by an uneven presentation.
In this how-to guide for business leaders, Wise (Communication Studies/Indiana Univ. at Purdue Univ. Indianapolis; Window of the Soul, 2009, etc.) offers her take on common managerial styles and practices.
The author begins this friendly, informal manual with a few familiar questions; for example, Wise asks readers if they’ve ever put forth their best effort at a company without receiving accolades or promotions. If so, she writes, it may not be entirely the readers’ fault; instead, it could be a result of their managers’ leadership style. Wise then presents a thoughtful case for “participatory leadership” by drawing on several expert sources, such as Stephen R. Covey’s bestselling 1989 book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. She defines leadership as the ability to create a positive environment where people feel empowered to be creative and seek opportunities for advancement. According to the author, participatory leadership allows for greater equality between employees and employers. By having more say about a company’s direction, she says, employees will form a stronger psychological attachment to it, resulting in increased productivity, professional growth, and customer satisfaction. In this brief guide—less than 100 pages in length—Wise discusses several business terms, such as “brand equity,” or a brand’s commercial value. She uses Starbucks as an example of a company with successful brand equity that seeks employee input, and characterizes this as a successful participatory leadership style. The author also offers personal examples of similar styles she’s witnessed in her own career, highlighting Franklin University of Ohio’s team-building exercises. Wise’s presentation sometimes has the feel of a term paper. However, her smooth prose is easy to read throughout, and she offers plenty to ponder in her creation of a specific job position, “Director of Participatory Leadership and Brand Management,” which would require the participatory leadership style that she presents in the rest of the book. However, nearly half of the work consists of comments by Wise’s students regarding her classes on fundamentals of communication and speech, which makes the main subject of the book easy to forget.
A compelling topic that’s hampered by an uneven presentation.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9653991-2-8
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Wise Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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