A wide-ranging discussion of how to spot and develop the ability to lead.
A longtime medical professional discusses the qualities needed for effective leadership in this nonfiction book.
Khan, a research compliance officer at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago, has ambitious aspirations for this text: to help “cultivate a global leadership mindset and skills to manage peace and make the world a better place for everyone.” His book, he says, draws on research, “his education, fifty-five-years of experience, and observation.” His experience includes time as an attending physician, pulmonologist, psychiatrist, college professor, chief of medicine, director of medical services, and hospital director. The author emphasizes the importance of good parenting, noting that his own parents were particularly encouraging; this allowed him to “unlock the abilities necessary to become a talented global leader,” which, he says, include insightfulness, self-confidence, open-mindedness, and courage, among other traits. A significant part of the book focuses on decision-making, with Khan providing more than a dozen examples of how he was able to quickly handle various medical cases. He also shares overviews of research related to brain development, focusing on the stages of childhood, genetics, and psychology. The book includes self-assessment and parent/caregiver-assessment tools, which aim to determine one’s base-line status when it comes to having or fostering leadership abilities. Over the course of this book, Khan presents readers with an earnest and appealing treatise on the nature of leadership that offers timely commentary (“Most of our current leaders are ‘illiterate,’ with no vision to make the right decision for the sake of people’s lives,” he asserts at one point) and proposes creating an “Independent Global Political Leadership” organization to assess world leaders. However, his medical case studies are the highlight of the book, providing an engaging and dramatic forum for showcasing his principles.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-1958066164
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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