Few would rank the aspiration to live by the Golden Rule as other than a worthy aspiration, but Ziglar’s zealotry can cast a...
Motivational speaker Ziglar tells the story of his professional, spiritual, and familial success.
Hilary Hinton Ziglar (“now you know why I go by the name Zig”) was born into a churchly family of 12 in the Deep South—a family constrained in finances but not in affection—and was raised in the “ ‘southern traditions’ of honesty, character, integrity, faith, loyalty, and love.” Along with his mother’s guidance, the difficult material circumstances of his youth fostered in him qualities of thrift and responsibility, open-mindedness and tolerance, self-control and fairness. He notes that he was lucky enough to recognize his failings—an addictive personality, overconfidence, some ego issues—before they laid him low, but what really propelled him to become a super salesman and then a motivational speaker was the good fortune of having had mentors who were willing to give him useful advice and a helping hand, among them a sales supervisor who told him to believe in himself and a sister who led him on his spiritual quest. He returned their favors, understanding “that real joy comes when you make a positive difference in other people’s lives.” Few will find fault with Ziglar’s emphasis on generosity, personal responsibility, and the “southern traditions,” but any who may not share his born-again faith should be prepared for a number of decidedly Christian notions that can appear to subvert some of his better qualities. He explains, for example, that “our nation is a ‘nation under God,’ discovered by a Christian (Christopher Columbus), and founded as a Christian nation by Christians,” and he remarks that when an employee once needed a liver transplant, he “personally prayed that Richard’s donor would be a Christian.”
Few would rank the aspiration to live by the Golden Rule as other than a worthy aspiration, but Ziglar’s zealotry can cast a pall over his larger program.Pub Date: July 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50296-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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 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
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