Warmly nostalgic yet highly relevant as a primer on building a firm and becoming a smart leader.
A debut author offers a business book disguised as a memoir.
Growing up in a blue-collar Alabama town, Birch may never have imagined she would start and run her own personnel recruitment firm. But one clue to her self-made success was the lesson she learned early on from Daddy about building a piano bench: “He said when something had to be done, it had to be done, whether he knew how to do it or not.” In a story that embraces much of that down-home wisdom, the author charts her childhood, delivering her recollections of the knowledge imparted by family and friends, many of whom stand out as memorable, sometimes quirky characters. As Birch matures, the reader witnesses her independent spirit evolving. She faced the typical and not-so-typical challenges along the way, from enduring failed relationships to becoming a working mother to realizing she had attention deficit disorder. Once she started her company, Birch remembered and applied many of her youthful experiences: “Two things I’d developed as a child turned out to be keys to my success in this business. One was how much I loved to win.…The other was the fact that people would tell me anything.” That second point is illustrated by several amusing anecdotes about job candidates—and employers—who do in fact share some remarkably intimate details with the author. The second half of the charmingly introspective book concentrates largely on Birch’s business escapades, some of which have her interacting with well-known personalities like Eunice Kennedy Shriver. The author’s richly adorned tales about people, whether famous or ordinary, are a highlight of the work. The final chapter is told in the same engaging style as the rest of the volume, but it cleverly interlaces 16 insightful “facts” with the narrative, such as “Fact #8: Look at your weaknesses as well as your strengths and partner with someone who can fill in your blanks.” In these pages, Birch maintains a rosy optimism and a keen knack for comprehending how lessons from childhood can serve one throughout life.
Warmly nostalgic yet highly relevant as a primer on building a firm and becoming a smart leader.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63299-108-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: River Grove Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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