A convincing rebuttal of the “Great Man” theory of history.
Debunking myths about leadership.
Drawing largely on standard biographies, four-star general McChrystal (Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, 2015, etc.), former Navy Seal Eggers, and Marine Corps veteran Mangone offer lively, succinct profiles of 13 leaders from diverse fields with the goal of examining assumptions about leadership as well as “challeng[ing] traditional leadership models.” Structured to emulate Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, the book pairs leaders to compare and contrast their qualities: Walt Disney and Coco Chanel represent business founders; Albert Einstein and Leonard Bernstein, geniuses; French revolutionary Robespierre and Iraqi jihadi Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, zealots; 15th-century Chinese fleet commander Zheng He and 19th-century American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, heroes; New York politician “Boss” Tweed and Margaret Thatcher, power brokers; and Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr., reformers. Confederate general Robert E. Lee, once “a symbol of stoic commitment to duty” whom McChrystal grew up admiring, merits a chapter of his own. Rather than devise a checklist of leadership traits, the authors ask why each individual emerged from their particular context as a leader: “What was it about the situation that made this style of leadership effective?” They dispel the idea of leadership “as a process-driven, action-oriented practice…of influencing a group toward some defined outcome.” Instead, they assert that leaders provide “a meaningful sense of direction” that is “clarifying and comforting.” In all cases, they see that to understand the power of a leader, “one must look away from the leader and toward the followers and institutions that enable them.” Leaders may be courageous and charismatic, but beyond those attributes, “they deliver something” that followers need or desire. Followers, therefore, must hold leaders accountable and “shape and confine their leaders’ styles.” Leadership, the authors maintain, cannot be reduced to a formula but “is contextual and dynamic” and “more about the symbolism, meaning, and future potential leaders hold for their system, and less about the results they produce.”
A convincing rebuttal of the “Great Man” theory of history.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-53437-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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