Illuminating and useful.
A distinguished business diversity expert advises women of color on how to move up the corporate ladder.
In this memoir and guidebook, Gadsden-Williams interweaves the story of her life as a black female executive with research statistics and savvy career tips for minority women also seeking to occupy the “C-Suite.” The author credits much of her success to parents who taught her the importance of “stick-to-itiveness”—in particular, her father, who managed to thrive in corporate management despite discrimination. In her own professional life, the author observed that although black women worked twice as hard to advance, they faced “concrete ceiling[s]” that left them unable to get to the next level. The way Gadsden-Williams managed to get ahead was to become as visible as possible in every organization where she worked. Along a path that took her from product development and marketing to human resources, she realized that her true professional calling was “fighting for the underdog” as a corporate diversity manager. The author’s insight helped her understand that a big part of success had to do with defining “passion and purpose.” Networking both inside and outside the companies where she worked, finding mentors to advise her and sponsors willing to invest in her career advancement, was also crucial. While she counsels strategic behaviors and decision-making throughout, Gadsden-Williams is also very clear that the notion that women can have it all is a “boldface lie.” Drawing on her own experiences living with lupus, she further reminds readers that self-care is essential. Because black women work twice as hard, they suffer “twice as much from certain illnesses than other groups.” Always candid about the realities of corporate life, the author offers sound advice for minority women seeking advancement, recognition, and meaningful lives.
Illuminating and useful.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61775-624-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Open Lens/Akashic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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