An energetic but conventional primer on the personal habits that yield success.
Parker presents a multistep guide to reaching financial and personal objectives.
In his nonfiction debut, the author assures his readers that he’s providing them with more than just a simple guide to prosperity; this book, per Parker, is “a crusade, a journey, an exploration through the wilderness of human potential, relationships, and unwavering tenacity.” At the heart of the guide is the author’s distinction between what he calls the “wealth mindset” and the “scarcity mindset”; the deepest elements of each are instilled in us from childhood experiences and social conditioning. In order to overcome such conditioning, Parker proposes many strategies, including “cultivation techniques” for the abundance-oriented perspective—habits such as practicing gratitude, visualizing desired outcomes, stressing present-in-the-moment mindfulness, and surrounding oneself with supportive people. He details nine habits of successful people, including managing time efficiently, learning from constructive criticism, and maintaining persistence in pursuit of goals. The author draws on a wide variety of examples, from business leaders to motivational authors to famous actors, and the various sections of his book are broken down into bulleted and numbered sections for quick reference. Readers of self-help or business motivation books (the obvious target audience here) will find much of what Parker has to say very familiar, whether he’s suggesting the use of “vision boards” or a Prosperity Gospel–like approach to manifesting wealth. And although his prose is clear and straightforward, some of the author’s examples are tone-deaf, as when he writes, “Elon Musk, the innovative entrepreneur and founder of companies like SpaceX and Tesla, exemplifies the principles of adopting success habits” (in 2023 alone, Musk, an increasingly unpopular figure, lost $25 billion on Twitter). But readers looking for accessible reminders of the basics will find them well presented here.
An energetic but conventional primer on the personal habits that yield success.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798989180820
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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