A spirited, useful, and thought-provoking manual that “teaches the powerful about their power.”
A guide offers a wide-ranging look at the state and changing nature of negotiation as a discipline.
In these pages, Federman seeks to explore a comprehensive and modern understanding of the art of negotiation, particularly as seen through the lens of modern sensibilities. “New understandings of transgenerational trauma, marginality, and structural oppression remain largely unaddressed in the negotiation field,” she writes. “This book adds peacebuilding wisdom to negotiation while showing how those working for social transformation can benefit from negotiation training.” One of the key figures working for social transformation in the book is the former convict and bestselling author of The Master Plan (2019), Chris Wilson, who “created his life vision and then repeatedly requested that the judge reduce his life sentence.” Wilson worked with a nonprofit to revitalize Baltimore neighborhoods. Federman likewise concentrates on the hard realities of life in Baltimore’s inner city in order to ground her concept of “transformative negotiation,” which means “striving for freedom from disenfranchisement, whether that shows up as debt, illness, and/or demeaning environments.” To help readers engage with her core concepts, the author regularly includes interactive sections, such as asking the audience to answer discussion questions. Throughout the manual, Federman is an energetic and engaging guide to the very personal, uplifting side of negotiation and the ways that various forms of the discipline can change individual lives. “Negotiation skills help you get somewhere,” she writes. “You decide where.” Discussing the tactics of transformative negotiation, she vividly dramatizes how to “negotiate for time, recognition, freedom, space, and physical security.” At every turn in her book, she takes the whole subject of negotiation out of the corporate boardroom and very effectively situates it squarely in the world of everyday people.
A spirited, useful, and thought-provoking manual that “teaches the powerful about their power.”Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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