Insightful and reassuringly positive; should help remote employees avoid land mines.
Three remote workers share their experiences and offer advice in this debut guide.
The concept of a remote workforce is often addressed from the employer’s viewpoint considering the impact it might have on the business. What sets this book apart is it is written from the perspectives of three employees who work remotely. Douglas, Gordon, and Webber team up to tell their stories through vignettes while offering “pro tips” to help prospective remote workers meet the unique challenges of operating in a location other than their employers’ places of business. Whether the information they share can be defined as “secrets” may be questionable, but their intent is sound: to provide the remote employee with an informal manual in order to navigate a nontraditional work arrangement. The authors break the book into six parts (effectively chapters) intended for remote workers and a seventh part directed at their managers. The guide’s first part is one of the most intriguing because it focuses on the psychological aspects of toiling remotely. Here, the authors’ own experiences, related conversationally, contribute to their intimate understanding of what it really takes to work “alone.” For example, a common misconception, according to the authors, is the notion that remote employees have more free time, but “the reality is actually the opposite…working from home means working more.” Less surprising is the difficulty associated with separating home life from work life. Thankfully, the authors do more than just observe these conditions—they suggest strategies for handling them throughout this timely and beneficial book. Other chapters concerning physical environment, logistics, and communication are more utilitarian, providing content one might expect, but they are no less helpful. The final chapter is basically sensitivity training for managers of remote workers. Here, the authors seem to not so subtly advocate for what might be regarded as preferential treatment: “As a manager in this environment, you need to take more overt steps to show recognition than you would in a traditional office setting.” Still, this chapter competently discusses the special managerial challenges of a remote workforce.
Insightful and reassuringly positive; should help remote employees avoid land mines.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5062-4856-1
Page Count: 134
Publisher: 750 Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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
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