Advice for succeeding in life, packaged in an easily digestible format.
It seems the most compelling stories of personal success are told by those who rise above major challenges in their lives and succeed against all odds. In this respect, Washington’s book follows a proven formula; the author overcame childhood demons that suggested that he wouldn’t amount to anything after he learned early on to have faith in God and himself. Washington went on to earn a PhD and become an award-winning college professor. It is this background that drives Washington’s philosophy of life, and he expertly lays it out in a little book that is both highly inspirational and inclusive of specific “lessons” from a man whose passion is teaching. Washington covers familiar ground, addressing such topics as fear, procrastination, passion, attitude, hard work and planning. But he goes beyond the typical “here’s how to succeed” manual by offering memorable, meaningful adages, including “Use Your Past, Not Abuse Your Past,” “If You Stay Ready, You Don’t Have to Get Ready” and “Trouble is Easy to Get Into, But Hard to Get Out Of” (the last one was taught to him by his mother). The author organizes the book into short, focused, simply written chapters, each of which is followed by a relevant lesson. Chapter 11, for example, concerns “You and Your Associations.” Here Washington makes the perceptive point, “If you spend your time with people who are not going anywhere, how long will it be before you assume their perspectives and thoughts as your own?...When you associate with people who are positive and trying to achieve something in life, your stock goes up.” He follows this with “Developing Relationships,” a lesson that includes six specific tips to help develop and manage relationships. Washington hits all the high points and, in so doing, packs a remarkable amount of solid guidance, seasoned with personal experience, into less than 160 pages. A well-written, inspirational, uplifting book with spiritual overtones that should spur readers to achieve better things in life.
Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615552200
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Washington & Company
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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