An up-and-down self-help manual that reads less like motivation for readers and more like an extension of the author’s brand.
A new motivational book from the acclaimed rapper.
It’s no surprise that the creator of the hit 2006 song “Hustlin’ ” can sense an opportunity. The idea of rolling out a post-pandemic rule book for those looking to make good on their quarantine dreams is a good one, even if Ross doesn’t quite pull it off. There’s no doubt that the multiplatinum rapper knows how to put words together. By fashioning them into bite-sized chapters devoted to truisms like “Stack Your Paper” or “Bosses Stay Students,” he makes it difficult to poke holes in many of his straightforward arguments. He even delivers some intriguing nuggets—e.g., when he writes about his visit to Kanye West’s mysterious artistic headquarters, Atlanta’s Pinewood Studios, the sprawling property owned by Dan Cathy, the controversial CEO of Chick-fil-A, who has apparently befriended West. “This kept happening during my visit,” said Ross, explaining how West would act and speak erratically. “Kanye would have my attention and he’d be onto something, but then he would lose me.” Interestingly enough, the same can be said for Ross, who makes some moves of his own that are hard to follow. He begins the first chapter with a lovely meditation about buying a John Deere tractor and how mowing his own lawn during the pandemic allowed him to explore his property in a way that he hadn’t yet because he was too busy. Later, he reveals it was essentially product placement and a way of using the book to make another deal. “The way I promoted my John Deere tractor earlier in this book, you might assume they were sponsoring all the landscaping costs at The Promise Land,” he writes. “They’re not yet. But I look forward to doing business with them in the future.”
An up-and-down self-help manual that reads less like motivation for readers and more like an extension of the author’s brand.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-335-52252-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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