Regardless of religious affiliation, readers facing adversity will find Marshall’s story encouraging.
A memoir from the first Black woman to be named the CEO of an NBA franchise.
Marshall has a history of being first. She was the first Black president of her high school, the first Black cheerleader at Berkeley, the first Black female officer at AT&T, and the first Black CEO of the Dallas Mavericks. She is also a cancer survivor. The author attributes her many blessings to her strong Christian faith and the love and support of her family. Marshall shares her career journey as well as intimate details of her battle with cancer and memories from her early life growing up poor in Richmond, California, where she and her family endured her father’s violent temper. However, even though her mother was “a victim of terrible domestic abuse for more than twenty years,” she provided Marshall and her siblings love and structure. Her mother always stressed the importance of school and church, places that provided the safety they lacked at home. “All six of us went to school, no matter what, just as we went to church. Structure and routine were our ways of handling my father’s unpredictable outbursts,” she writes. “Education and faith were our paths out of the projects.” Throughout, Marshall is candid about the many hardships she has endured in her life, and she shows how her faith has helped her find opportunities for growth. She also shares Bible verses that have encouraged her to continue her fight and entries from the journal she kept during her cancer treatment. Reading Marshall’s story, it is apparent that her confidence and strong will have been primary contributing factors to her success. On several occasions, the author describes times when she would seemingly forego the feelings and concerns of others in order to meet her needs or to stick to her plans. Hers is truly a story of survival.
Regardless of religious affiliation, readers facing adversity will find Marshall’s story encouraging.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35941-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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