WORKING WELL

Name: WORKING WELL
Author: Stephanie Berryman
ISBN: 978-1-9991708-0-6

by Stephanie Berryman ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A thought-provoking and optimistic set of tactics for stress elimination.

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Awards & Accolades

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A comprehensive guide to reducing workplace stress.

This latest book from corporate trainer and consultant Berryman (Nine Strategies for Dealing With the Difficult Stuff, 2016) aims to help readers identify the effects of stress in their own lives and in those of the people around them. She then offers ways for readers to change their responses to stress, reduce it, and increase their productivity. Berryman’s strategies draw on the author’s personal experience helping clients in her private practice.She begins with general statistics that bear witness to the widespread, harmful effects of stress on the workplace, and on workers’ physical health, in particular. She then proceeds to carve out a series of strategies that range from the internal (“Just as you would never expect to be able to run without a break for eight hours a day, you wouldn’t expect uninterrupted activity from your brain either”) to the communal (“Approaching a person with curiosity rather than judgment makes our relationships stronger”). In all cases, Berryman emphasizes enhancing self-awareness and taking the time to step back and notice harmful and beneficial patterns. This comes into sharpest focus in a chapter on creating positive new habits; she describes habits, in general, as “the brain’s way of saving energy,” and throws light on the fact that many stress-inducing elements are, in fact, merely bad habits—which are, of course, susceptible to change. She also notes that people often don’t realize how much power they’re giving away to harmful people and situations; in essence, the steps that she outlines here effectively aim at taking that power back.

A thought-provoking and optimistic set of tactics for stress elimination.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1-9991708-0-6

Page Count: 314

Publisher: Manage to Engage

Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS

FROM LBJ'S GUNS AND BUTTER TO REAGAN'S VOODOO ECONOMICS

by Hobart Rowen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1994

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Strong language and strong medicine about the decline of the American economy, but marred by overwrought prose and Monday- morning quarterbacking. Rowen, a columnist for the Washington Post, attributes America's economic decline not to unfair trading practices by Japan or other external factors. It is, he says, a case of ``self- strangulation.'' Rowen examines the men and women who have made economic policy since the Johnson administration. Without attributing any venality (other than perhaps the playing of partisan politics) and admitting that people did the best they could, he nonetheless does assign blame for the low economic state to which the nation has sunk. Emerging from WW II as the only country with an industrial base untouched by war, the US was the most powerful nation on earth. Then, from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, it went from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. Rowen ignores JFK, whom he knew personally and who arguably set in motion events leading to the problems Rowen cites. The current crisis, he argues, was initiated by Johnson's Vietnam adventure, which crippled the Great Society and set up a virulent inflationary cycle in its attempt to have both guns and butter. The blunders of LBJ gave way to Nixon's disastrous wage- and price- control attempts, and the abandonment of the gold standard. Ford and Carter were hamstrung by OPEC and were, according to the author, nothing short of inept. By far his harshest criticism is leveled at Reagan's ``voodoo economics,'' with its vain hope that wealth would trickle down from the top. Rowen also attacks Congress, describing it as spineless. For the future, he says, Americans will have to adjust to the economic rise of Asia, focus on high-tech industries, and become less greedy. Rowen's case is compelling, if not totally convincing. He also gives readers a poignant mini-memoir about the life of a newspaperman covering the powerful.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8129-1864-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Times/Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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CHRISTINA STEAD

A BIOGRAPHY

by Hazel Rowley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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An absorbing biography that will help Stead's fans place her fiction in the context of her life and may well attract new readers to her work. Christina Stead (190283), who was born and died in Australia (about which, writes Rowley, she was ``both nostalgic and patronising''), did her writing during her years in Europe and the US. Although she tapped real events and people for her fiction—and not just for her autobiographical novels, including the superb The Man Who Loved Children—she could be secretive in her private papers, identifying people by fictional names, writing in code, and ultimately destroying many documents. Despite this obstacle, Rowley (an Australian academic, currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University) offers a coherent and convincing portrait that reaches back into a youth in which Stead was overshadowed by her father, who first instilled in her a lifelong socialist orientation, insecurity about her appearance (he dubbed her ``Pig Face''), and a yearning to be adored by a man. When she arrived in London in 1928, Stead found just the man—William Blake (originally Blech), whom Rowley succinctly describes as a ``Marxist investments manager who seemed to know something about everything.'' Blake hired her to be his secretary, and Stead accompanied him to Paris, where their romance flourished—despite a wife who would not divorce Blake for 23 years. When the bank employing Blake collapsed, the pair fled to New York. Stead's writings earned only modest royalties even when favorably reviewed, and Blake could not find work, so they returned to Europe in a consistently difficult hunt for economic security that gave their lives a nomadic flavor. By 1949, Stead said to a friend, ``I have been a writer, quite unsuccessfully for twenty years,'' although a revival of interest in her work, which began in the mid-1960s, helped her return to Australia in 1969 as a famous author and ``Official Personage.'' A welcome study of an underrated author. (16 pages of photos, not seen)