A spirited, useful, and thought-provoking manual that “teaches the powerful about their power.”
A guide offers a wide-ranging look at the state and changing nature of negotiation as a discipline.
In these pages, Federman seeks to explore a comprehensive and modern understanding of the art of negotiation, particularly as seen through the lens of modern sensibilities. “New understandings of transgenerational trauma, marginality, and structural oppression remain largely unaddressed in the negotiation field,” she writes. “This book adds peacebuilding wisdom to negotiation while showing how those working for social transformation can benefit from negotiation training.” One of the key figures working for social transformation in the book is the former convict and bestselling author of The Master Plan (2019), Chris Wilson, who “created his life vision and then repeatedly requested that the judge reduce his life sentence.” Wilson worked with a nonprofit to revitalize Baltimore neighborhoods. Federman likewise concentrates on the hard realities of life in Baltimore’s inner city in order to ground her concept of “transformative negotiation,” which means “striving for freedom from disenfranchisement, whether that shows up as debt, illness, and/or demeaning environments.” To help readers engage with her core concepts, the author regularly includes interactive sections, such as asking the audience to answer discussion questions. Throughout the manual, Federman is an energetic and engaging guide to the very personal, uplifting side of negotiation and the ways that various forms of the discipline can change individual lives. “Negotiation skills help you get somewhere,” she writes. “You decide where.” Discussing the tactics of transformative negotiation, she vividly dramatizes how to “negotiate for time, recognition, freedom, space, and physical security.” At every turn in her book, she takes the whole subject of negotiation out of the corporate boardroom and very effectively situates it squarely in the world of everyday people.
A spirited, useful, and thought-provoking manual that “teaches the powerful about their power.”Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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