An inventive, imaginative, and beautifully crafted management guide.
Consultants Danley and Hughes tackle various business-management challenges in a simulated medical manual.
This debut assesses an array of management problems as if they were “diseases and disorders,” using a highly stylized format. Each entry details the aspects of each “condition”—including “healthy and normal function,” “causes of dysfunction,” risks, symptoms, prognosis, and treatment. The relatively short descriptions and bulleted text make for a book that’s easy to scan as well as read in-depth. It also calls attention to a multitude of typical workplace problems by ingeniously classifying them into “personality-based diseases and disorders” and “culture- or system-based diseases and disorders.” The book includes more than 50 separate, richly described conditions, each illustrated with a brief but relevant case study, and the descriptions are spot-on throughout; for example, “Abusive Insecurity” is defined as “The tendency to denigrate employees after they experience a significant success in order to keep them humble, fearful, and dependent.” The prognosis for this condition includes a perceptive warning: “The true irony is that by behaving in this manner, the boss finally makes his or her worst fear a reality.” Although the overall work has a serious purpose, the style is occasionally tongue-in-cheek—particularly regarding the diseases’ names, such as “Foot-in-Mouth Disease” and “The Perpetrating Savior.” There’s real genius in this book, though; the authors’ ability to parse out the individual conditions is remarkable, as are their keen insights into each specific management problem. A final, succinct chapter offers their take on management ills in general: “If we ever hope to operate worthy organizations, these diseases and disorders must be identified, understood, and treated.”
An inventive, imaginative, and beautifully crafted management guide.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4834-5456-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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