Black & Blue: Love, Sport and the Art of Empowerment is Andra Douglas’ fictionalized rendering of a lifetime loving the game of football and being told she couldn’t play. Good thing for us she never took those words to heart. Readers are treated to an often picturesque account of her upbringing in the American South, her relocation to New York City to pursue a career in the early Eighties, and…
Culture Fix: How to Create a Great Place to Work from Liverpool, UK born author Colin Ellis is the latest entry in an ever growing library of books addressing the subject of organizational / corporate culture. It is difficult to conceive of a work more comprehensive and well-rounded on this subject; Ellis leaves no stone unturned in his appraisal of what it takes to implement and nurture a business culture that…
Ray Wylie Hubbard may not be top of mind to casual Country/Americana music fans, but he certainly influenced a slew of the musicians making that music today. It seems rather appropriate then that Hubbard’s peers and acolytes would come together to explain his musical brilliance in writing. The Messenger, though not the best book to explain the life and career of Hubbard (that one would be his own 2015 memoir,…
Kris Oestergaard’s Transforming Legacy Organizations is a short book brimming over with information. It has an ambitious aim. Oestergaard studies how long-standing companies with deep histories are able to compete with modern start ups if they are willing to embrace innovation, encourage a culture valuing its principles, and commit themselves towards overcoming whatever perils may obstruct their vision for future development. His examination is well rounded. There are no extended sidebars or…
The financial information pertaining to risk factors alone are what help pack Risk: Living On The Edge full of vital history in the age of mass data and tells some great stories involving the rise of it all in chapter 3, and that’s one of its more fascinating parts early on for me. The information in the stories are key to getting interested in the following chapters in the book…
There have been numerous books written about Athens-based R.E.M. dating back to the mid-1990s, but few seem as personal as the latest entry from former Athenian Robert Dean Lurie. The book strength is also, at times, its biggest weakness. The author, who moved to Athens, GA in the ‘90s, in part thanks to its burgeoning music scene, inserts his own narrative into some of the book. And while it can…
One of the keys to making “self help” books, especially those of a decidedly professional nature, successful for readers is personalization. It is one thing to, essentially, consume a multi-hour lecture in text form, no matter how well composed, if there is no personal element present in the author’s presentation. It is quite another thing, however, to feel drawn into the life experiences that helped shape their philosophy and carried…
Given today’s current sensitivities around, well, just about everything, it’s hard to image even a third of the movies profiled in Mike McPadden’s fantastically entertaining encyclopedia of teen comedies, Teen Movie Hell, ever being made. But for those who grew up in the ‘80s trying to catch a glimpse of nudity via scrambled cable movies on channels you didn’t subscribe to, or their slightly more watered down cinematic siblings on…
Christina Reeves and Dimitrios Spanos, co-authors of The Mind is the Map: Awareness is the Compass and Emotional is the Key to Living Mindfully from the Heart, bring a personal touch and considerable intellectual firepower to the aforementioned work. It is a condensed and focused book, clocking in at less than three hundred pages, and their tight aim on promoting a system oriented approach to realizing human potential likely means the…
This is, unfortunately, a timeless book. I say unfortunately because there shouldn’t be a need for Joan Kuhl’s Dig Your Heels In: Navigate Corporate BS and Build the Company You Deserve in these presumably enlightened times. You would think that our modern age and society would have long since put out to pasture the workplace/professional inequality that has bedeviled women since time immemorial, but you would be wrong to believe so. Kuhl’s…
