Essential protocol for those seeking to hone their apology skills.
How to apologize with grace and sincerity.
Since 2012, Ingall and McCarthy have been analyzing the art of the apology in contemporary pop culture, the news, and politics for their website, SorryWatch.com. This book is a synthesis of their research and the varying perspectives they have chronicled on the site. Even though “good apologies are one of the [life] tools we could all be deploying more,” write the authors, apologizing well is agonizingly difficult for many (most?) grownups.” In conversational prose featuring anecdotal examples, Ingall and McCarthy present six easy-to-follow steps for apologizing effectively. They analyze the many reasons why saying you’re sorry is such a difficult process and present instances where the dynamic power of a resonant “I’m sorry” can create positive change and deepen mutual understanding. They discuss the art of the public apology and how it became “fashionable” for politicians and public figures hoping to save face. They explain how to comprehend why a specific behavior was bad and how to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, and they discuss how to initiate reparations. Throughout, the authors reveal surprising examples of good apologies as well as the neuroscience and psychology behind poor ones—in addition to the things never to say when attempting to right a wrong. Naturally, the bad apologies comprise the text’s juiciest material, and the authors present the five worst celebrity, corporate, and political apologies of all time—e.g., Mark Wahlberg’s vague 1993 apology for hate crimes he committed as a teenager; Harvey Weinstein’s ambiguous response to numerous sexual assault accusations; and Ellen DeGeneres’ issuing nebulous regrets about her toxic work climate. Ingall and McCarthy firmly believe that apologies “civilize” our culture; in making amends for a wrongdoing, they create a happier, more forgiving society, and they offer key teachable moments for children. Closing each chapter are achievable and proactive apology action items for readers eager to do better.
Essential protocol for those seeking to hone their apology skills.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781982163495
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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