An innovative view of personal empowerment seen through the lens of a technology pioneer’s life.
A motivational business book focuses on the career of computer industry icon Steve Jobs.
“What does it take to make it to the top?” Toguchi (co-author: Land Warfare in the Information Age, 2004) asks in this work, centering his narrative on “one remarkable individual who relied upon his skills, habits, and behaviors to achieve success.” Of that list, the item to which the author devotes the bulk of his attention is habits, which he views as the keystone of both life and success. “Habits prepare entrepreneurs for the storm,” he writes, mapping his study of the intricacies of habits onto the biography of Jobs and his lifetime of innovation. Toguchi takes readers through the well-known stages of Jobs’ career at Apple, outside of Apple, and then back at Apple, and he touches on the setbacks the visionary encountered, including the cancer that eventually claimed his life. Toguchi deftly draws on these biographical details in order to draw morals that are unfailingly upbeat: “You can overcome the difficulties of life with the right attitude and perseverance,” he writes, pointing out that Jobs had a remarkable ability to identify significant features and see a clear path to achieving his design concepts—whether or not that road aligned with the advice of the professionals around him. “In solving his problems, Steve Jobs did not rely on marketing surveys to steer his choices for consumers,” Toguchi writes. Instead, the entrepreneur trusted in his “own intuition and gut instincts.” Readers will find the author a lively, engaging counselor, although the more familiar they are with the history and nature of Jobs, the less they might believe some of Toguchi’s assessments, including that the magnate epitomized the kind of individual who “exuded a positive attitude” and that he “developed the habit of making a great first impression.” Jobs’ many enemies would laugh at such comments, but even skeptics should appreciate the optimistic spirit of the author’s conclusions.
An innovative view of personal empowerment seen through the lens of a technology pioneer’s life.Pub Date: May 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2205-0
Page Count: 166
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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