Mostly standard but engaging self-improvement fare that’s nicely packaged.
Motivational leadership wisdom from a former professional hockey player and coach.
Sports professionals know a thing or two about performance, and Walter (Hockey Plays and Strategies, 2009, etc.) shares his thoughts on the subject in this book, which weaves together personal stories; numerous quotes from athletes, businessmen, politicians, scientists, and others; and solid advice. “There is a mysterious, universally-available inner energy that feeds all high performance,” he writes, which is also the impetus for the book’s title. In expected sports-analogy style, he divides the content into three sections: “Inner Game,” “Outer Game,” and “Team Game.” Each section is further divided into three key forms of “fuel”; for instance, the Inner Game covers “Purpose & Passion,” “Futuring,” and “Believing” under the subtitle of “Core Fuel.” Each chapter closes with exercises, “leadership tips,” and a graphic of a car’s fuel gauge, which the reader is asked to shade in based on “how full your Purpose and Passion tank is today.” The parallel structure lends the book consistency and helps one anticipate what’s coming next even if the book’s “fuel” theme does sometimes feel a bit gimmicky. The content is, for the most part, typical for a leadership book, but there are occasional flashes of uniqueness; for example, the discussion of “Framing” in the Outer Game section provides intriguing food for thought: “Framing is not just about all the positives that we choose for our team and ourselves,” writes Walter. “It is also about the things that we choose to frame out.” Another bit of wisdom worth mentioning is the author’s take on failure, which he says “is not a person; it is an event.…The key is not to allow failure to stop our emotional forward momentum.” The overall style of the book is informal, breezy, and likable, and its use of numerous graphics makes for easy reading. In the concluding chapter, appropriately named “Game On,” the author reprises each of the fuel gauges in the form of a “Hungry Dashboard,” advising the reader to “Keep your tanks full to stay hungry.”
Mostly standard but engaging self-improvement fare that’s nicely packaged.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9869281-1-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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