Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
NonfictionHistoryCultural History

Golden Years

James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
Previous
Next

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre
Business & Finance

First steps on the career path

Review by bookpagedev

"Not making a decision IS a decision," says a friend. He should know. After graduating from a fine law school he lounged for two months on a sofa in his parents’ basement watching Oprah, Ricki Lake and all forms of daytime TV in his bathrobe. Was he afraid of work? No, he was avoiding the inevitable decision of what to do with his law degree. Not making a decision about a job meant he didn’t have to face the fact that he didn’t want to work for the traditional large law firm.

No time is more uncertain for college or professional school graduates than the summer they’re about to enter. Fortunately, recent career books offer valuable advice for making a smooth transition from school to work. Most experts recognize that step one in getting a job is defining what you really want to do with your career.

What’s Your Type of Career? Unlock the Secrets of Your Personality to Find Your Perfect Career Path by Donna Dunning utilizes a personality approach to finding the perfect career for you. Worksheets help you determine your personality type (analyzer? visionary? explorer?), then Dunning guides the novice through the options for each type. Don’t be embarrassed if you’re an introvert. Dunning highlights the usefulness of that personality type in the healing arts (not to mention writing) and outlines why some outgoing people may be drawn to certain careers. No Parachute Required: Translating Your Passion into a Paycheck and a Career by Jeff Gunhus is a soup-to-nuts career book with a twist. Hip and aware, Gunhus offers the traditional "How to Prepare for Your Job Search" stuff, but also starts and ends his book with the unconventional caveat that "it makes sense to do your soul-searching now, at the beginning of your career, and start on the right path the first time out of the gate." A chapter on your inevitable and upcoming "Prelife Crisis" is priceless. Gunhus, 28, has experienced these feelings of angst and doubt up-close and personally, not to mention, recently. I loved his exercises to help weed parental expectations from your garden of experience ("My Tommy has always wanted to be a Doctor!") and wish I had read this book before I filled my college course load with chemistry classes.

Rick Nelles, author of  Proof of Performance: How to Build a Career Portfolio to Land a Great New Job, is a professional recruiter with 20 years of experience, but his book is about the times, right after college, when he made all his mistakes. Looking back, he says he waited until the last quarter of college to job search, winged it going into interviews ("thinking they would hire me on my good looks and great personality") and didn’t even know what he wanted to do. In this book, he shows recent grads how to land a job by documenting their job skills and showing proof of their performance. Build Your Own Life Brand! by Stedman Graham is an atypical career book. The long-time companion of Oprah Winfrey, Graham owns a successful management and marketing consulting company. He shares his philosophy that "each of us has a unique blend of talents, knowledge and other personal assets" called a Life Brand. Borrowing from marketing strategy, Graham says "you create a method for sharing your gifts and putting them to their highest use" when you build the brand that is You. Above all, Graham advises, remember that transforming your talents, values and passions into your career will help to ensure that your work will be meaningful.

So how did my friend fare? He finally got off the couch and became a public defender. Later he took a job as the child advocate for a five-county court system. Recently, after soul-searching, he moved to a small law firm he loves. Life Brand, perfect personality matching, whatever you call it, with careful planning the right career choice lies just ahead.

 

"Not making a decision IS a decision," says a friend. He should know. After graduating from a fine law school he lounged for two months on a sofa in his parents' basement watching Oprah, Ricki Lake and all forms of daytime TV in his…

Business & Finance

Review

Review by bookpagedev

irst steps on the career path “Not making a decision IS a decision,” says a friend. He should know. After graduating from a fine law school he lounged for two months on a sofa in his parents’ basement watching Oprah, Ricki Lake and all forms of daytime TV in his bathrobe. Was he afraid of work? No, he was avoiding the inevitable decision of what to do with his law degree. Not making a decision about a job meant he didn’t have to face the fact that he didn’t want to work for the traditional large law firm.

No time is more uncertain for college or professional school graduates than the summer they’re about to enter. Fortunately, recent career books offer valuable advice for making a smooth transition from school to work. Most experts recognize that step one in getting a job is defining what you really want to do with your career.

What’s Your Type of Career? Unlock the Secrets of Your Personality to Find Your Perfect Career Path by Donna Dunning utilizes a personality approach to finding the perfect career for you. Worksheets help you determine your personality type (analyzer? visionary? explorer?), then Dunning guides the novice through the options for each type. Don’t be embarrassed if you’re an introvert. Dunning highlights the usefulness of that personality type in the healing arts (not to mention writing) and outlines why some outgoing people may be drawn to certain careers. No Parachute Required: Translating Your Passion into a Paycheck and a Career by Jeff Gunhus is a soup-to-nuts career book with a twist. Hip and aware, Gunhus offers the traditional “How to Prepare for Your Job Search” stuff, but also starts and ends his book with the unconventional caveat that “it makes sense to do your soul-searching now, at the beginning of your career, and start on the right path the first time out of the gate.” A chapter on your inevitable and upcoming “Prelife Crisis” is priceless. Gunhus, 28, has experienced these feelings of angst and doubt up-close and personally, not to mention, recently. I loved his exercises to help weed parental expectations from your garden of experience (“My Tommy has always wanted to be a Doctor!”) and wish I had read this book before I filled my college course load with chemistry classes.

Rick Nelles, author of Proof of Performance: How to Build a Career Portfolio to Land a Great New Job, is a professional recruiter with 20 years of experience, but his book is about the times, right after college, when he made all his mistakes. Looking back, he says he waited until the last quarter of college to job search, winged it going into interviews (“thinking they would hire me on my good looks and great personality”) and didn’t even know what he wanted to do. In this book, he shows recent grads how to land a job by documenting their job skills and showing proof of their performance. Build Your Own Life Brand! by Stedman Graham is an atypical career book. The long-time companion of Oprah Winfrey, Graham owns a successful management and marketing consulting company. He shares his philosophy that “each of us has a unique blend of talents, knowledge and other personal assets” called a Life Brand. Borrowing from marketing strategy, Graham says “you create a method for sharing your gifts and putting them to their highest use” when you build the brand that is You. Above all, Graham advises, remember that transforming your talents, values and passions into your career will help to ensure that your work will be meaningful.

So how did my friend fare? He finally got off the couch and became a public defender. Later he took a job as the child advocate for a five-county court system. Recently, after soul-searching, he moved to a small law firm he loves. Life Brand, perfect personality matching, whatever you call it, with careful planning the right career choice lies just ahead.

irst steps on the career path "Not making a decision IS a decision," says a friend. He should know. After graduating from a fine law school he lounged for two months on a sofa in his parents' basement watching Oprah, Ricki Lake and all forms…
NonfictionAudioMemoir

Lost & Found

Review by Mari Carlson

Like a game of hide-and-seek, Kathryn Schulz’s memoir is both whimsical and a little terrifying. In three seemingly innocuous sections, titled “Lose,” “Find” and “And,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author develops a fugue, incorporating etymology, personal narrative, philosophy and even a meteorite. But the heart of Lost & Found (7.5 hours) is Schulz’s focus on herself, the father she loses and the partner she finds.

With the same exquisite precision as her New Yorker articles about the Pacific Northwest and other topics, Schulz explores settings ranging from Cleveland hospital rooms to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but her heart and mind are the real landscapes to discover, and she does so with tenderness, humor and aplomb. She reads her own audiobook, delivered with a slight lisp and certain breathlessness, and nearly every sentence comes through in a meditative, soothing cadence.

Schulz invites listeners into a bittersweetness that’s as mundane as it is cosmic. Like a childhood game, no one will want it to end.

Read our starred review of the print edition of ‘Lost & Found.’

In Lost & Found, read by author Kathryn Schulz, listeners are invited to discover a bittersweetness that’s as mundane as it is cosmic.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Review

Review by bookpagedev

n the trail of A Cold Case As decent and democratic and objective as you think yourself to be and probably are, when you watched the movie A Few Good Men and heard Jack Nicholson as the tough Marine colonel shout, “You can’t handle the truth!” you may have felt a small, silent, shameful twinge of agreement. We often want someone to make our problems go away without being told the truth about the messy, not-necessarily-legal ways they were dealt with.

An unspoken understanding of this nature forms part of the background of A Cold Case by Philip Gourevitch, whose previous book We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award. Gourevitch has produced another potential award-winner in this slim account of the solving of a 27-year-old double murder in New York City.

In relating his part of the story to the author, Andy Rosenzweig, chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney, acknowledges without noticeable bitterness this flexible standard toward truth on the part of the public. However, people who know Rosenzweig tell the author that it was a message from another movie High Noon, in which an upright lawman is abandoned by a spineless citizenry that has most influenced the investigator: This is a twilight world in which the two sides of the law are not always distinct and for which Rosenzweig, though an honorable cop, always felt an affinity.

To call the murder in question here an unsolved crime is not totally accurate: Everyone knew who shot and killed Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn on February 18, 1970, at McGinn’s apartment after having tangled with the pair earlier in the evening at the restaurant McGinn owned. The murderer was Frankie Koehler, a man with an extensive criminal past, including an earlier homicide in 1945 when he was only 15 years old. After the slayings, Koehler simply disappeared.

Rosenzweig knew both victims and liked Glennon especially. He had not been in on the original investigation and was reminded of the case by a chance incident in January 1997. He began to look into it and discovered that somewhere along the line the case had been closed because Koehler had been presumed for no good reason, as it turns out dead.

Rosenzweig got permission to reopen the “cold case.” Gourevitch recounts some neat deduction and legwork until Koehler was tracked down in California, living under another name. The story has about it more than a whiff of Dashiell Hammett (a quotation from one of whose stories serves as an epigraph), the Hammett of the grim, relentless harshness of life.

It is not revealing too much to say that Koehler was captured on a return trip to New York, because half of the book is about Koehler’s confession and defense. In some respects this is the most fascinating part of the story. In the videotaped confession, which Gourevitch says “has come to be regarded at the D.

A.’s office as one of the classic portraits of a criminal personality,” Koehler “is not confessing so much as taking credit for his crimes.” More than once Koehler speaks of his “desire to be understood not only as a murderer but also a sparer of life.” Koehler’s attorney, Murray Richman, a mob lawyer who revels in his lowlife connections, is a piece of work himself. Richman likes criminals for their “simplicity” and believes that “murderers are the straightest guys in the world.” In a way, he makes the reader think of John Mortimer’s British barrister, Horace Rumpole, who also has a fondness for his clients, except that Richman’s criminal contacts are considerably more dangerous and less charming than Rumpole’s “villains.” Koehler’s defense consisted primarily of a war of nerves between Richman and the prosecutors, who were worried about the problems an old case presented. Richman held out for the lowest sentence he could get. As for Koehler, in the letters he wrote while being held on Rikers Island he “seemed to believe the lashes of his own conscience were all the punishment he needed.” When Gourevitch went to California to see where Koehler had lived, he found that the murderer was remembered fondly by those who had known him. When he went to visit Rosenzweig, who had retired to run a bookstore in Rhode Island 12 days before Koehler’s sentencing, he found him working, unofficially, on another case.

The only thing wrong with this book is that it is over too quickly. We hunger to know even more about these intriguing characters.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

n the trail of A Cold Case As decent and democratic and objective as you think yourself to be and probably are, when you watched the movie A Few Good Men and heard Jack Nicholson as the tough Marine colonel shout, "You can't handle the…
Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Batter up There are several schools of baseball. One follows numbers, the statistics that drive the game and rivet baseball fans. Another dwells on nostalgia, a sense that things were better, purer in the “old days.” Then there are those like Robert Benson, who take an almost spiritual approach, honoring the game as a precious legacy to be passed from one generation to the next.

In The Game: One Man, Nine Innings: A Love Affair With Baseball, Benson combines several perspectives: those of a writer, a father and, of course, a baseball fan. One can imagine accompanying the author to his game of choice, a rather ordinary minor league affair between the Iowa Cubs and the Nashville Sounds, as he sits back during the course of nine innings to ruminate on myriad topics. With writing that is both spare and reverential, Benson compares the plays of a game with the joys and sorrows of day-to-day living. He notes that “baseball is a game of routine things.” In the minor league game he chronicles, “Of the fifty-one outs, only three or four of them came on great plays, or even above average plays.” The Game will be categorized as a sports book, but like baseball itself, it’s a metaphor for life. Sometimes you hit a home run; sometimes you make an error. As the game winds down, the author hopes his children will one day recall the important life lessons it offers: “I wish for them that they will remember that there will be days when the best that can be done is to move the runner . . . that even the best of us . . . strike out a fair amount.”

Batter up There are several schools of baseball. One follows numbers, the statistics that drive the game and rivet baseball fans. Another dwells on nostalgia, a sense that things were better, purer in the "old days." Then there are those like Robert Benson, who take…

NonfictionTrue Crime

True-crime writing at its best

Review by bookpagedev

Dominick Dunne became a chronicler of criminal justice for the rich and well-connected after his own daughter was murdered in 1982 by her boyfriend. But his fascination with high-profile crime first surfaced during his youth, as he admits in his new book, Justice, in a chapter on the 1943-44 trial and conviction of Wayne Lonergan for the murder of his socialite wife and brewing heiress Patricia Burton. "I was a teenager in boarding school at this time," he writes, "and I remember risking expulsion every afternoon by sneaking into the town of New Milford, Connecticut, during sports period to read the latest accounts in the New York Daily Mirror and the New York Journal American at the local drugstore."

The 18 articles in this collection were written originally for Vanity Fair. They cover the trials of the Menendez brothers for the shotgun slaying of their parents, of Claus von Bulow for the attempted murder of his wife and the still-in-progress proceedings against Kennedy kinsman Michael Skakel for the bludgeoning death of young Martha Moxley. But Dunne devotes most of these pieces to the endlessly absorbing trials of O.J. Simpson both the one he won and the one he lost. Dunne relates that he became such a familiar fixture in court that during the civil trial Simpson approached him smiling and offering his hand. Dunne says he declined to shake hands but notes that Simpson despite all the revelations about him still possessed an almost irresistible charm.

Dunne is at his best when revealing the personalities and social backgrounds of the principals who confront each other in the courtroom. A dogged gatherer of facts and gossip, he always seems to know the right people insiders he bumps into at elegant parties who have tantalizing information to share about the trial in question. He makes no pretense of being objective, freely coloring his accounts with his own impressions and biases. He is contemptuous of Judge Lance Ito in the first Simpson trial, less than dazzled by prosecuting attorney Marcia Clark, but quite taken with police detective Mark Fuhrman.

Socially privileged himself, Dunne brings an insider’s perspective to his coverage of the trials of the well-to-do that few other crime reporters can hope to match. Always perceptive, ever engaging, with Justice, Dunne has done it again.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville.

 

Dominick Dunne became a chronicler of criminal justice for the rich and well-connected after his own daughter was murdered in 1982 by her boyfriend. But his fascination with high-profile crime first surfaced during his youth, as he admits in his new book, Justice, in a…

Want more BookPage?

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Nonfiction

All Nonfiction

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features