It’s not Marcus Aurelius, but there’s plenty of thoughtful, soldierly advice to chew on in McChrystal’s pages.
The former general offers nostrums for how to be a better human in a worsening world.
Character, McChrystal writes, is “the appropriate destination of our life’s journey,” something that’s learned along the way and that results from the confluence of one’s convictions and the discipline needed to live up to them. Discipline means, at one level, that you decide to undertake a challenge, you undertake it, you do it again, and pretty soon it’s ingrained. “The most effective people I know can’t help themselves—disciplined pursuit of their goals is an unshakable habit,” he writes to underscore the point. It’s altogether too easy to shirk, to pass the buck, to fail—and then to leave the field to someone else. Most of his lessons have a martial bent, and there McChrystal often draws from the same well as he has in other books. He clearly hasn’t recovered from the psychic blow of being relieved of his military command for incautious comments made around a scoop-hunting reporter, for one thing. But there’s a new, subtle critique at play here, too: One doesn’t have to read too deeply between the lines to know who he’s talking about when he writes, “When the best, most qualified people are silent, the field is left to the less principled and less qualified—often the demagogues.” Even less subtle is his passing remark on the events of Jan. 6, 2021: “Rhetoric, in person and online, trumpeted the need to stop ‘them’ from stealing an election.” Like a good soldier, McChrystal blames the foot soldiers less than “those who stayed on the sidelines.” Suffice it to say that although he doesn’t profess to be woke, he urges that the opposite of wokeness not become the norm again and that the military remain above the daily fray, since “a politicized military is a dangerous institution in any nation.”
It’s not Marcus Aurelius, but there’s plenty of thoughtful, soldierly advice to chew on in McChrystal’s pages.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780593852958
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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