A useful and stimulating guide to building a career under trying circumstances.
An African woman maneuvers her way to success in a hypermasculine industry in this business self-helper.
Mpofu, an executive leadership coach, derives career and management lessons from her unusual life story. Born into a middle-class family in Zimbabwe, she was encouraged by her father to pursue a career in a STEM field. She earned a degree in chemistry and then a Ph.D. at the University of South Australia and took a job in South Africa at the multinational Anglo American Platinum mining company. It was a rewarding but difficult road, in her telling. As a Black woman in an industry traditionally dominated by White men, Mpofu often found herself “the only one in the room who looks like me.” Initially relegated to routine tasks, she had to lobby her bosses for more challenging assignments. When she got them, they involved trips to mineral-processing facilities in the field, which caused issues for her as a single mom as well as sartorial problems with the coveralls tailored for men’s bodies. Moving from production to the business-strategy side of the company, the author was passed over for promotion in favor of a male hire. A leap to a new company brought her a vice presidency, but when that position was made redundant, she had to scramble to reinvent herself. From these ups and downs, Mpofu distills wisdom on business success, including the importance of setting clear, actionable career goals; building networks of female mentors and co-workers who can help one another weather male-dominated workplaces; cultivating a humane leadership style; avoiding feelings of inadequacy and imposter syndrome; projecting confidence; and persevering through setbacks with sheer grit.
Mpofu’s autobiographical narrative, while often engaging, makes for a somewhat disorganized and repetitive framework for her ideas, which are not presented in a systematic way. (The book’s few exercises are perfunctory and often just refer readers to a lesson template on her coaching company’s website.) Many of her managerial and motivational tropes are familiar, but she has original and captivating ones of her own, some suggested by her experiences on safari. (An incident in which an elephant snaked its trunk around her neck illustrates the importance of staying calm in a crisis, and she enjoins managers to be generous with their underlings the way a lion, after gorging on a kill, will allow vultures and hyenas to feast on the rotting remains.) Mpofu’s prose sometimes lapses into fulsome management-lit uplift (“We need leaders who are visionary, compassionate and empathetic, with high levels of consciousness; leaders who value their employees and communities, and create sustainable shared value”), but she can also be pithily aphoristic—“One must be resilient and think fast, rather than wait for life to happen”—and even lyrical in the poems she sprinkles into the text. (“I am thankful even to those who have given me pain / Without pain, there is no growth, there is no gain.”) Mpofu’s writing sharply registers the galling implicit bias facing women in the office—“When the table is taken away and the door is shut in your face, leaning in doesn’t help”—but her program of working hard, self-directing, forging relationships, and being open to new experiences is a hopeful, empowering one.
A useful and stimulating guide to building a career under trying circumstances.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-64-523371-1
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Peak Performance With Patience Pty Ltd
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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