A fascinating portrait of the father of self-help and incisive analysis of the mercurial era that produced him.
Watts (Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream, 2008, etc.) recounts the life and times of motivational guru Dale Carnegie (1888–1955).
The author goes beyond simple biography to explore the sea-change in American thought heralded by the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), examining the social, technological and economic upheaval of the early 20th century that shifted emphasis from the idea of “character” to “personality,” a more individual-centered focus made possible by unprecedented opportunities for prosperity. Carnegie—born Carnagey—the shrewd author may have sought to align himself in the public mind with successful industrialist Andrew, no relation—grew up in poverty on a farm in Missouri, baffled by the failure of his parents’ devotion to Protestant and Victorian ideals of hard work, self-denial and moral rectitude to reap the rewards of material success. Carnegie undertook a number of professions—successfully, in the case of selling meat products, less so in the fields of journalism, acting and fiction writing—before finding great success as a public speaker preaching the gospel of personal reinvention, positive thinking and the importance of cultivating relationship skills. His classic manual on the subject was an instant, massive hit, a revolutionary distillation of Carnegie’s principals that continues to sell in significant numbers today and essentially inaugurated the still thriving genre of self-help. Watts portrays Carnegie not as a wildly original thinker or electrifying guru figure but rather as an easygoing, avuncular, self-deprecating (he long maintained a file entitled “Damned Fool Things I Have Done”) man, a brilliant synthesizer of ideas from psychology, philosophy, advertising and his own experience. He was an intuitive savant who grasped the nature of his changing times and crafted a message that resonated with a mass culture struggling to adapt.
A fascinating portrait of the father of self-help and incisive analysis of the mercurial era that produced him.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59051-502-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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