An often useful and entertaining book aimed primarily at women with high-end careers.
A detailed plan to help women successfully manage and balance their careers and family lives.
Ettus (The Experts’ Guide to the Baby Years, 2001, etc.) advises women to think of their lives as pies cut into pieces. The size of each piece depends on the circumstances of one’s life at any particular time. There are seven “basic” pieces, she says: career, children, health, intimate relationships, community, friends, and hobbies. She then provides exercises to help readers analyze what the size of each pie piece should be; a chart guides readers, for example, to see the difference between “broad” and “achievable” goals. Woven throughout are examples from Ettus’ personal life and from the lives of 150 “accomplished women” she interviewed. A finance executive, for example, talks about learning “to focus on finding the right men to work for, those who didn’t see baby making as an obstacle.” She also says that she found a company who understood her desire for a career and motherhood, and she succeeded at both. Ettus’ writing is engaging and smoothly moves from one story to the next, interspersing easy-to-use practical advice. Readers will be able to focus on particular chapters that resonate and leave others aside without losing comprehension. The author’s use of detail will help readers relate to stories and advice; in the parenting chapter, for example, she explains, “[Family] Rituals can be as simple as trying a new kind of lasagna every Thursday night….Do broccoli lasagna one week and Mexican lasagna the next.” Ettus doesn’t pretend life is a fairy tale, though; she explains that her “pie” began to “crumble” when she was simultaneously dealing with shingles, her father’s bladder cancer, and her child’s pneumonia. However, she and the vast majority of women she interviews have highly successful careers. Women who aren’t as career-driven or financially privileged may have trouble relating to the story of a sales executive who solves some of her time issues by having two nannies, for example. Additionally, all the women are in heterosexual relationships and have nuclear, two-parent families.
An often useful and entertaining book aimed primarily at women with high-end careers.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939457-23-3
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Ghost Mountain Books
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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