A straightforward guide for rolling up your sleeves and being enlightened.
A reformed underachiever and armchair philosopher puts his thoughts and ideas into action tackling some of life’s biggest existential issues: meaning, purpose and fulfillment.
At a time of profound personal confusion, it didn’t sit well with Whitaker when he was told by his brotherthat, sorry, you’re just “uncoachable.” But when the author’s brother delivered this sobering pronouncement, something moved inside the frustrated entrepreneur and sometimes writer. It spurred him to act, to take stock of his life and to confront the causes of his unhappiness. Whitaker found that it was his entrenched thought patterns, ideas and beliefs about his life that were causing him great pain and suffering. Powerful messages from an insatiable media delivering fear one moment and materialism the next had pummeled Whitaker into submission and set him on a hollow life’s journey that many may find all too familiar. “The story you’ve been forced to read—by your family, friends, the media, the marketers, the retailers, and religion,” he says, is “a churning amalgam of material success pursuits, eternal salvation, hellfire, celebrity worship, lifestyle envy, salving bromides, wedding days, dismaying divorce, apocalyptic distraction, fear-based economics, and age-old wisdom about embracing life’s simple things (meant to stem the rising panic inside).”The author devotes much of his lively narrative to railing against these modern evils—as well as taking aim at organized religion and even unhelpful family and friends—before getting down to work. And hard work is exactly what Whitaker’s approachis all about. At its heart, the author’s debut is a guide for personal growth and reflection, which requires readers to first dig deep into their own psyches in order to formulate a moral code, a values code and an ideals code. With these elemental building blocks in place, Whitaker promises that the meaning of life—or rather, the meaning of your life—will become apparent. “This is one of the most important realizations to embrace,” he says. “The meaning of life is different for everyone, even close friends or family members.” Eschewing whatever possibilities may or may not exist beyond our current life spans, Whitaker instead roots his system for personal and perpetual self-fulfillment in this current reality. The blue-collar approach is one that many earnest self-help seekers will find refreshingly free of supernatural or mystical components. But they must first commit to completing the self-analytical exercises that Whitaker puts forth.
A straightforward guide for rolling up your sleeves and being enlightened.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991479801
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Oddward TKE
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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