A retread of themes and content explored in his previous book, mainly of interest to fans of Grazer’s work.
The award-winning Hollywood producer recounts how his skill in effectively making human connections has directly contributed to his successful career and home life.
In this upbeat though somewhat redundant follow-up to his previous book, A Curious Mind (2015), Grazer takes readers on a loose anecdotal journey through his life and career highlights, sparked by many memorable personal encounters. As a young boy struggling with the limitations and awkwardness of undiagnosed dyslexia, Grazer came to realize that books and classroom study weren’t going to provide his ideal path for learning. Instead, acquiring the ability to form meaningful human connections, starting with direct eye contact, would ultimately provide the results he desired. “To this day, connecting with people is still how I learn best,” writes the author. “More than that, it has become a central practice in every aspect of my life….It is my secret to getting things done, reaching my goals, and feeling energized and empowered. It’s how I thrive, how I grow, how I feel fulfilled, and how I feel purpose. Without doubt, I would not have the life I have today if I didn’t make the effort to genuinely connect with others.” Grazer goes on to describe the particulars of these many encounters, including the inspiring lessons he learned from master communicators such as Oprah Winfrey; his efforts building trust with temperamental artistic talents like Eddie Murphy, Spike Lee, and Eminem; and his methods for overcoming his anxiety about public speaking. Grazer is an amiable storyteller, and his reasoning can be persuasive. However, his examples too often cast a light on his achievements as a Hollywood insider rather than being relatable. As an influential film and TV producer, the odds are stacked in his favor that most individuals would want to interact with him. Here, he rarely summons up more common obstacle examples that would affect an average Joe.
A retread of themes and content explored in his previous book, mainly of interest to fans of Grazer’s work.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4772-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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