Inspiring insights from an in-the-trenches leader.
Tulane University president emeritus Cowen reflects on elements of effective leadership in this guide aimed at students and early professionals.
For the author, whose 50-year academic career included a 16-year tenure as Tulane University’s president, “every teachable moment on my journey not only made me a better leader but also equipped me with the skills and qualities that I needed to cope with the unimaginable crisis that would end up defining the rest of my career: Hurricane Katrina.” In 10 conversational chapters, Cowen shares his own experiences and challenges (including his dyslexia, which remained undiagnosed until his early 20s) in the context of discussing precepts to “help you become the resilient, adaptive leader you need to be in a world of constant crises.” These include: stepping up and earning the respect of others (such as when he remained alongside staff and faculty who rode out Katrina on campus); cultivating mentors and mavericks in your advisory mix (a mentor gave Cowen a surprising yet critical push to leave an early limiting teaching job), and, most critically, “mobilizing people to accept the ‘new normal’ and focus on the silver linings” (in Cowen’s case, adding a public service requirement to Tulane’s curriculum following Katrina). Each chapter ends with “reflection” and “action” prompts to apply the author’s ideas in developing one’s own leadership capabilities. An esteemed educator who also served as interim president at Case Western during the Covid-19 pandemic, Cowen here is an appealingly down-to-earth Socratic sage guiding his target audience in assessing their own capacity for leadership. While most topics covered will likely be familiar to leadership guide readers, Cowen’s section on “adaptive leadership,” the focus of a course that he developed at Tulane, is particularly compelling—its six outlined principles (including “ensure inclusive, innovative, and thorough solution-finding”) are guideposts that any aspiring leader would do well to follow.
Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798891384101
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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