by Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2017
A book that provides illuminating ways to make headway through the days when there doesn't seem to be a way forward.
A memoir of the loss of a husband and finding a path forward beyond the grieving process.
Sandberg (Lean In for Graduates: With New Chapters by Experts, Including Find Your First Job, Negotiate Your Salary, and Own Who You Are, 2014, etc.) was living a life with all of the fulfillments one could hope for. After a comfortable upbringing and education at Harvard, she worked her way up to become a vice president at Google and eventually the COO of Facebook. She presented a popular TED talk and then wrote a book on her "lean in" conceptualization of women in the workplace. However, no amount of professional accomplishment could prepare her for the sudden passing of her husband, Dave, in 2015, after which she had to figure out how to carry on as a mother of two and make the shattered pieces fit back together. This moving book is the result. Writing with Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, 2016, etc.), a highly rated professor at Wharton, Sandberg explores how to weather the storm of grief, applying concrete skills in addition to more complex theories of psychology about how to find meaning in life-changing circumstances. Going deeper and broader than the commonly understood stages of grief, the authors look at different factors that can stunt recovery after a loss—e.g., self-blame and the fear that the loss will permeate every aspect of life indefinitely. Sandberg shows her struggle with finding a comfort level regarding the sharing of her emotional status and learning when to push the level as well as when to respect it. The challenges of moving forward are immense beyond understanding for anyone outside of the experience; this accounting of Sandberg’s resilience does for the process of grieving what her previous work has done for women in the workplace.
A book that provides illuminating ways to make headway through the days when there doesn't seem to be a way forward.Pub Date: April 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3268-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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