Insightful and refreshingly honest, if readers can get past the therapeutic jargon.
A memoir of strenuous soul-searching by a former Exxon executive who failed to find fulfillment in a successful corporate career.
There are two main threads between the covers of this slender volume: one, a story the author hopes will help other career executives balance their work and personal lives; the other, the story of a scientist who eventually accepts nonscientific therapies during a journey of self-discovery—a journey takes him through a series of oddly named experiences, such as a class named “The White-Hot Yoga for Awakening and Awakened Agents of Change,” a support group called “Temple of the Beloved” and a program called “Waking Down in Mutuality. Those who doubt the efficacy of those therapies may find it difficult to make it through Epperly’s story of what happened after he lost his executive position, at age 51, during a major corporate downsizing that ended his distinguished 29-year career at Exxon. After Exxon, Epperly continued his chemical engineering work at two other companies, focusing on innovative ways to reduce industrial acid-rain pollutants, before retiring at 61. He achieved professional and financial success, but a painful childhood left him with feelings of inadequacy. As an only child, he witnessed frequent fights between his mother and alcoholic father, and Epperly feared that his mother might abandon him if she decided to flee the marital hardship. That fear was the “core wound” Epperly identified after many therapeutic experiences, including channeling, meditation, visualization and spiritual self-assessment. He credits his wife with leading him on the journey of self-discovery that directed them away from the Presbyterian Church in which they were active and into secular therapies. “She longed for a deeper intimacy in our marriage,” he writes, “something that I was clueless about at the time.” A less-personal narrative style would most likely be more useful to executives seeking the work-life balance that eluded Epperly, and the fact that some passages read like advertisements for seminars the author attended doesn’t help the book’s appeal, either.
Insightful and refreshingly honest, if readers can get past the therapeutic jargon.Pub Date: June 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989487900
Page Count: 142
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
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