Khan delivers a highly readable mixture of motivational manual and medical memoir.
A leadership guide with an autobiographical foundation.
In his nonfiction debut, Pakistan-born physician Khan lays out his concept of “natural-born leaders”—people who are “optimistic, selfless, and do not seek external rewards or glory,” and instead seek “a sense of internal satisfaction and happiness.” According to the author, such people are “target-oriented, fully focused, self-confident, and intrinsically motivated to accomplish their tasks,” and the main goal of his book is to help his readers identify and enhance the natural-born leadership qualities inside themselves. Khan himself says that he “unlocked” his own leadership skills while working as an internist, pulmonologist, and chief of medicine in Saudi Arabia, but he says that he began the process in childhood, when he embraced responsibility and its rewards. The author takes readers through the various stages of his career in medicine, from residency to upper management, and draws lessons about self-confident leadership from a variety of trying circumstances—lessons that Khan asserts are crucial in the modern era, when the world is suffering from a “crisis when it comes to leadership.” Some of Khan’s points can seem muddled; for example, he appears to believe, as the book’s title implies, that the ability to be a natural-born leader is achievable by anyone, which seems to conflict with the idea of a “leadership crisis”; if everybody can be a natural-born leader, then the world should already be full of them. Fortunately, the quality of the other major narrative strand of Khan’s book—his personal experiences dealing with patients, fellow doctors, and supervisors over a career spanning half a century—more than compensates. Their behind-the-scenes glimpses of the medical world are consistently gripping, whether they demonstrate the “unlocking” of leadership traits or not.
Khan delivers a highly readable mixture of motivational manual and medical memoir.Pub Date: July 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5245-9956-0
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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