A concise distillation of more than five decades of leadership knowledge—good reading for all of the 2016 presidential...
The former secretary of defense offers insights into being an effective leader.
With an impressive record of service that also includes positions as director of the CIA, president of Texas A&M University, and, currently, chancellor of the College of William and Mary, Gates (Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War, 2014, etc.) knows more than most about being a productive, respected leader. In this informative, entertaining, and useful book, he delves into what it takes to be a leader who can get results without creating unnecessary enemies. He enumerates certain aspects or criteria that are required for someone who wishes to be a trailblazer in the private or public sectors and then backs up these ideas with rich examples from his own work experiences. “The important thing to remember is that in any public or private sector organization, whether it has three million employees or three,” he writes, “having a clearly defined and achievable vision—or set of goals—and getting priorities right in moving forward are preconditions for successfully leading change.” It’s also important to maintain transparency regarding information, to consult with employees at all levels, and to establish methods of accountability. The author’s real-life examples are the strongest part of the book, as they show a side of bureaucracy and of upper-level leadership not often revealed to the public. These scenarios give readers a better understanding about how these organizations function. "The task of reforming institutions is a difficult one,” writes Gates. “A leader's heart must be on fire with belief in what she seeks to do. Changing institutions is a battle, and she must undertake it with courage, strength, and conviction." By following the author’s advice, most aspiring leaders will be able to do so.
A concise distillation of more than five decades of leadership knowledge—good reading for all of the 2016 presidential candidates.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-95949-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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