A serious and enthusiastic guide to taking control of one’s destiny.
A back-to-basics book dispenses advice on clarifying one’s life.
Successful businessman DeCoursey fills his nonfiction debut with telegraphic sections designed to keep his readers focused on key questions. Do you know what you want out of life? Do you like what you’re doing? Do you have a specific timeline for changing what you want to do into what you are doing? In laying out this bullet-pointed program for achieving the balance he views as essential for a happy, fulfilled life, the author downplays the idea of chance, favoring instead personal agency. “I have had a lot of people tell me that I am ‘lucky’ because I managed to find success in lots of different categories of my life,” he writes. “The problem is, I don’t believe in luck as a trait that some have and others don’t have.” The core of his book is refreshingly old school; the author’s insistence on personal responsibility wouldn’t have been out of place in self-help manuals from a century ago. “If you don’t hold yourself accountable,” he writes, “you start making excuses for why nothing went right for you.” And these excuses take the form of an “economy of falsehoods,” in which people’s refusal to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own actions can escalate over time. At the heart of DeCoursey’s work is the “DISC” concept, first developed by David P. Snyder in his book How to Mind-Read Your Customers (2001). In the sales and marketing world—and, by extension, in life in general— people can be categorized according to four personality types: Dominant, Influential, Steadfast, or Conscientious. Clearly assessing both their own types and the types of others should help readers achieve the personal and professional balance that’s the goal of the work. Some of the book’s punchy lessons are fairly rudimentary—stay positive, avoid fake smiles, don’t answer text messages during meetings, etc.—but the brisk main body of the message should be thought-provoking to just about anybody.
A serious and enthusiastic guide to taking control of one’s destiny.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Realist Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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