An effective amalgam of satire and practicality, McCammon’s functional playbook takes the guesswork and much of the mystery...
A handy how-to guide on cultivating and applying today’s most useful business skills.
Despite its relentlessly droll delivery, media editor and etiquette columnist McCammon’s office primer provides pages of valuable advice for anyone already working in or hoping to score a rewarding office job. Drawing from his personal experience, the author knows well the insecurities that can sabotage self-confidence and productivity. After years editing an in-flight magazine, the author was recruited in 2005, at age 30, for an editing job at Esquire, a position for which he considered himself seriously underqualified. “I didn’t know how to work at a big magazine and I didn’t know how to live in a city like New York,” he writes. Yet a decade later, the author remains with the publication, and he chronicles his Manhattan awkwardness (spun into learning experiences) while dispensing the proven employment tactics that made him a comfortable and more self-assured professional. McCammon’s material covers many situations and common conundrums encountered both inside and outside of the business world. Job-seeking readers will scrutinize chapters on assertive interviewing strategies (express authenticity and candor), the importance of discretion, effective speechwriting, and honing underappreciated talents like small talk and firm handshakes. McCammon’s checklist on maintaining proper office decorum encompasses everything from emailing and social media restraint to sartorial guidelines, avoiding “assholery” (there’s a quiz), and the timeless values of punctuality, contact, and a positive attitude. Though some of his advice won’t resonate with every reader (“apologies are purely emotional”; “one drink is just the right amount”), the author’s alacrity at dispensing these office-centric gems is infectious. The condensed appendices at the end of the book include a reading list and a refreshing rundown of general business rules.
An effective amalgam of satire and practicality, McCammon’s functional playbook takes the guesswork and much of the mystery out of job searches and appropriate office etiquette.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95502-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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