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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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