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Defining Style

Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

For one fleeting, “iridescent” moment, that crucial summer of 1972, June Sprigg considered committing to the Shaker way of life. In a way, she has. She didn’t, of course, sign the Covenant; even if she wanted to, the Shakers no longer accepted converts. Since celibacy formed an important tenant of their faith, and membership had peaked more than a century earlier, only a few of their number remained. In that remnant mostly female and faltering physically faith, duty, and love burned as brightly as ever, igniting in the then-19-year-old Sprigg a hunger to discover and internalize their quality of contentment.

The author’s interest in Shaker workmanship and a curiosity about the Believers themselves first dawned during childhood vacations, but it was during that first summer at a Shaker community in Canterbury, New Hampshire, that the direction of her life changed forever. Sprigg searched photo albums and the absorbing journals of Shaker Elders, she guided tours, and immersed herself in the aura of days long past yet startlingly present. There, she recorded her observations in journal entries and drawings; there, Simple Gifts finds its genesis less in researched information than through actually experiencing the atmosphere and personalities of the Shaker life.

With Simple Gifts, Sprigg continues to enliven the history of this unique tradition and its followers. “Hands to work, hearts to God” shapes the Shaker ethic, in which the community is emphasized over the individual; precision is paramount in craftsmanship, in relationships, and in personal actions; technology is embraced when it leads to proficiency and product, rejected where it threatens unity.

Perhaps dearest to young June while in Canterbury were Lillian, a gifted musician, 80 years a Shaker, who had come as a teenager for physical healing and unexpectedly found her calling, and Bertha, consummate cook, who functioned more comfortably as a “simple Kitchen Sister” than in leadership roles thrust upon her as Eldress. Gertrude, Eldress recently transplanted from the Sabbathday Lake community, was a night-owl, unfailingly late for breakfast, but forgiven not only because forgiveness came readily to the Shaker spirit, but also for her unflagging charm. Her malapropisms provided continual amusement.

That summer of 1972 changed Sprigg’s life, and she, in turn, enriches others’ lives by perpetuating the record of this remarkable sect through her writing and sketches. In Simple Gifts, the author’s crystalline imagery, insightful observations, and gentle portraits transport the reader to a serenity not often achieved. With Sprigg, readers walk a rich path. Perhaps, with such a knowledgeable tour guide, readers will explore deeper possibilities for their own life experiences.

Reviewed by Evelyn Minshull.

For one fleeting, "iridescent" moment, that crucial summer of 1972, June Sprigg considered committing to the Shaker way of life. In a way, she has. She didn't, of course, sign the Covenant; even if she wanted to, the Shakers no longer accepted converts. Since celibacy…

Pop CultureArts & Culture

The small things that change the world

Review by bookpagedev

In its own way, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point exemplifies its subtitle: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, tells the stories of seemingly minor incidents that build to matters of great consequence. The tipping point, Gladwell writes, is the moment at which an idea catches on and spreads. He uses the metaphor of epidemics to describe these events, posing the questions, Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?

Part of the effectiveness of The Tipping Point lies in the intriguing illustrations Gladwell uses to explain his ideas. Chapters focus on such epidemic catalysts as Paul Revere, cigarettes, the Columbia House gold record advertising campaign, "Sesame Street," Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, subway shooter Bernie Goetz, teen suicide in Micronesia and Airwalk sneakers.

These examples serve to illustrate Gladwell’s three components of the Tipping Point, which he calls The Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. As diverse as these topics are, Gladwell manages both to maintain the specificity of each example and apply it usefully to his Tipping Point theories. The Bernie Goetz case, for example, illustrates what Gladwell calls the Power of Context, which argues that the psychological or sociological backgrounds of Goetz and the youths on the train have less to do with what happened than their environment. Gladwell argues that the eventually historically significant altercation had everything to do with the message sent by the graffiti on the walls and the disorder at the turnstiles. The Power of Context says you don’t have to solve the big problems to solve crime. Instead, cleaning up the subway system can help.

The Tipping Point alternates between daunting and heartening in what it asks its readers to do and understand; as Gladwell writes, What must underlie successful epidemics is a bedrock belief that change is possible. That faith is often elusive. After reading Gladwell’s book, however, and comprehending exactly what Paul Revere’s ride and the Columbia House advertising campaign have in common, the world around us seems eminently ripe for tipping for the better.

Eliza McGraw teaches English at Vanderbilt University.

In its own way, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point exemplifies its subtitle: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, tells the stories of seemingly minor incidents that build to matters of great consequence. The tipping point,…

Business & Finance

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The informed American investor or export-oriented corporate executive now knows more about the doings in Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea than he or she imagined possible a year ago. It’s all due to the "Asian Contagion" or "Asian Flu," those snappy oversimplifications used to describe the various currency and macroeconomic woes afflicting these heretofore fast-growing Asian economies. What the problems of Asian nations ultimately mean for American businesses and financial markets remains to be seen. What is certain is that in an ever more tightly bound global economy (for better times and downturns), it’s important to know what’s going on on the other side of the globe.

So far, for the most part, China has stayed out of the doom and gloom headlines. It is, of course, a nation whose sheer size makes it of a different order. Its currency is still not convertible on world markets, its government is still officially Communist with a capital C, and yet this massive nation (population 1.3 billion and growing) has the most realistic chance of reordering the world’s economic hierarchy in the 21st century. Big Dragon: China’s Future: What It Means for Business, the Economy and the Global Order, by Daniel Burstein and Arne de Keijzer is everything you want to know about the place where such a large percentage of the world’s people reside. It’s also a well-informed, comprehensive, moderate, and cautiously optimistic treatise on the implications of China’s growing economic liberalization and power.

The wild swings in even informed American views toward China bespeak a nation still essentially a mystery to us. From euphoria at the first signs of economic opening in China (a billion-plus drinkers of Coca-Cola), the pendulum has swung to a decidedly dark view of U.S.

The informed American investor or export-oriented corporate executive now knows more about the doings in Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Korea than he or she imagined possible a year ago. It's all due to the "Asian Contagion" or "Asian Flu," those snappy oversimplifications used to describe…

Memoir

Review

Review by bookpagedev

It is a startling coincidence to have, in one season, the appearance of not one but two memoirs about William Shawn, the former editor of the New Yorker Ved Mehta’s Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing and Lillian Ross’s Here but Not Here: A Love Story (Random House, $22.50, 0375501193) but perhaps more interesting is that, while each is an elegy for Shawn, the two books couldn’t be more different.

The differences make Mehta’s and Ross’s memoirs complementary; indeed, alone, each is only a partial picture of Shawn, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief for more than three decades. In his book, Mehta, a staff writer at the magazine from 1961-1994, depicts the platonic but intense affection between a writer and his editor. In her book, Ms. Ross, also a longtime New Yorker staff writer, delivers without apology the confessional tale of her over 40-year- long affair with the married Shawn. Mehta’s memoir which is as gorgeously written as his magazine pieces and his previous 20 books (Remembering is the eighth in an autobiographical series entitled Continents of Exile) is a lament not only for Shawn but for a bygone era of chivalrous good intentions and courtly behavior in the literary world, an era of editorial paternalism and excellent manners. Shawn’s New Yorker which lasted from 1952-1987, when Shawn, at the age of 77, was asked by the new owner of the magazine to resign was less a business than a family, peopled by the likes of J.D. Salinger, John Updike, Renata Adler, A.J. Liebling, St. Clair McKelway, and Maeve Brennan, writers to whom Shawn demonstrated fatherly allegiance. Not only did Shawn respond like a "Talmudic scholar," to his writers’ work, says Mehta, he frequently ministered to their more personal needs including, in some cases, forgiving them their messy debts and hospitalizing them when mental illness or alcoholism overtook them. In Here but Not Here, Ms. Ross, covers similar historic ground, but laments more directly the loss of Shawn as a person. Ross’s purpose is to make the reader see the real Shawn hopelessly in love, plagued by phobias, blocked in his own writing, and overwhelmed by his own invisibility as an editor and a human being. "Responsible as he was, toward the magazine and the lives of all the creative people involved with it," Ross writes, "attuned as he made himself to all their frailties and disappointments and successes and joys," Shawn "could do nothing to help himself. He wanted someone to know and believe there was more to him; he was desperate to feel alive." In late 20th-century America, when the line between the public and the private has become utterly blurred, Mehta’s is the decidedly public memoir of Shawn and Ross’s the utterly personal. Ross’s book complicates and completes Mehta’s reverent portraiture, but raises the question: How is one to reconcile the two William Shawns Mehta’s Algonquin-frequenting, dignified father figure, and Ross’s obsessive lover, who would leave his editorial desk at night and stand across the street from Ross’s fifth floor apartment, staring up for hours at her lighted window? In the end, these memoirs are twin halves not only of Shawn, but of an era in American culture the early to mid 1960s a time of public good taste and, behind the scenes, some very private secrets. Reviewed by Julie Checkoway.

It is a startling coincidence to have, in one season, the appearance of not one but two memoirs about William Shawn, the former editor of the New Yorker Ved Mehta's Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing and Lillian Ross's Here but…

NonfictionMemoirFamily & RelationshipsEssays

Raising Raffi

Review by Kelly Blewett

As a mother of three, I can attest that parenting often feels like it comes at you fast: the meals and snacks, bedtimes and books, laundry and more laundry; the hat-straightening, screen time-monitoring, play date-booking and chore-reminding whirlwind of it all. That’s why it’s fantastic when someone thoughtful manages to hit pause on the relentless motion and reflect on what it all means. In Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, Keith Gessen does just that.

Covering everything from the surprises of a home birth to the days of desperately reading parenting manuals through a sleep-deprived haze, Gessen’s essays are at once intensely specific (he lives in New York, is the son of Russian immigrants and works as a literary writer and editor) and deeply relatable (even to me, a woman who lives in a suburb in the Midwest). For instance, he writes that fatherhood opened up heretofore unexamined aspects of his personality. Why, he wondered, did he want to speak to Raffi in Russian, even though all of their relatives are able to speak English? It is a mystery, more of a gut instinct than a bilingual regimen, that prompts his wife (the novelist Emily Gould) to nickname him “Bear Dad.” Throughout Raising Raffi, Gessen’s profound ambivalence over his Russian heritage feels pressing, heartfelt, sad and real. He also writes about the COVID-19 pandemic with a clarity that parents who have been raising young children during the last few years will appreciate and remember.

Gessen’s book raises the big questions: Who am I as a parent? What exactly am I passing down to my kids? And can I even really control what I pass down to them? Gessen’s essay about sports, for example, gently probes the pros and cons of getting Raffi to play hockey, eventually folding back and looking at itself as Gessen realizes that his own attachment to hockey wasn’t the best thing for him. Other essays, like his one on picture books, demonstrate the deep, abiding connection one can feel with a child through repeatedly reading poetry and stories.

This book is thoughtful, companionable, funny and memorable. Readers will return to it again and again—and will hope, like I do, that Gessen publishes a follow-up about Raffi’s next five years.

Read more: Keith Gessen brings a sense of reassurance to the audiobook for Raising Raffi.

In his companionable, funny, memorable memoir, Keith Gessen hits pause on the relentless motion of parenthood and reflects on what it all means.
Technology

Review

Review by bookpagedev

es for job seekers and employers It’s that time of year again. The days are short and dreary; your job seems tedious and boring. Staggering mountains of holiday bills convince you that career advancement should be a springtime priority.

We’ve all seen the TV commercial in which a prospective employee receives flowers and fruit baskets from CEOs trying to lure him to work for their companies. All he did was post his resume on the Internet. If he can do it, you think, so can I. A mountain of fruit baskets waits in your future! Who’s not thrilled about the prospect of your potential advancement? The human resources department at your present employer. As the clever commercial suggests, the HR game is getting tougher and tougher these days. It is not too strong a statement to say that successful hiring can directly affect a company’s bottom line.

In fact, Frederich W. Ball and Barbara B. Ball say the most critical battle waged in business today is the war for talent. They address this hot topic head-on in Impact Hiring: The Secrets of Hiring a Superstar. Today, these recruiting and interviewing experts say, job candidates aren’t interviewing to try to get a job; they interview to see if they even want a new job. Superstar candidates know that for every offer they receive, there are two or three more corporations queuing up to court them. This happened to a friend recently. Following an MBA program at a top school, he was offered seven jobs with different corporations; all considered him a superstar candidate. Each post offered significant pay and an array of wonderful benefits. All offered to help his spouse relocate, find childcare, even pay for closing costs on a new house. Ultimately his choice hinged on what the Balls call “knowing the candidate’s agenda.” The financial strength of the company, the entrŽe to an interesting and challenging position and the strength of the senior management team led him to choose a job with a company whose culture reflected his own beliefs and whose corporate vision was filled with future possibilities. CEOs and human resource directors, as well as upper level managers with hiring responsibility, should read this book. Ball and Ball offer insight into the secrets of tapping and, more importantly, attracting superstar candidates. With keen understanding and years of corporate experience to boot, they outline the crucial steps every recruiter (for businesses big or small) needs to succeed when bringing a superstar player on board. While Impact Hiring offers insight into how to attract the best new recruits, Winning the Talent Wars: How to manage and compete in the high-tech, high-speed, knowledge-based, superfluid economy by management expert Bruce Tulgan traces the reasons companies lose their best talent. Tulgan says company loyalty is a thing of the past. The corporate downsizing and restructuring of recent years sent a clear message to employees: individuals must take responsibility for their own careers. Free-agency is an existing mindset for employees, and it will drive a more efficient market-driven economy, Tulgan believes.

Winning the Talent Wars explores the macro-level employment forces at work in the economy and confronts employers with the reality that they need to reevaluate their compensation systems to best attract and retain talented employees. Tulgan says employers must embrace the new economy and come to understand its effect on current employment trends. He stresses pay-for-performance approaches and wants businesses to turn managers into coaches, leading the team to perform. He challenges corporate leaders to “create as many career paths as you have people” and restructure the traditional notion of climbing the corporate ladder. His is an exciting proposition, one that will appeal to many 25- to 40-year-olds seeking jobs.

Winning the Talent Wars tells the stories of corporate executives who have gone to battle for talent and are beginning to win the war. “More and more of your best people are leaving, or talking about it, or thinking about it,” Tulgan says. Learn strategy that allows retaining employees and hiring new ones to be a win-win situation.

In recent years, newspapers have seen a decline in classified advertising revenue as employers put more want-ads on the Internet. But not everyone, and certainly not every company, is taking advantage of the Internet revolution. Poor Richard’s Internet Recruiting: Easy, Low-Cost Ways to Find Great Employees Online by Barbara Ling is a great introduction to both looking for employees and looking for your own new job.

Why recruit on the Internet? For most businesses the advantages are easy to see. First, Ling says, it’s often free. And who doesn’t want to free up money for R&andD or salary incentives or customer research? Just look at the bottom line. The Web is quicker, can be read 24/7, is easy to use for both prospective employees and employers and is an easy form of corporate advertising.

Ling knows her subject area well. An online columnist for the Boston Herald, she has written on Internet recruiting and led seminars on the subject. After you’ve finished her comprehensive guide to web recruiting, you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.

Staying ahead of the competition is the idea behind Richard C. Whiteley’s Love the Work You’re With: A Practical Guide to Finding New Joy and Productivity in Your Job. What causes people to leave their jobs? Increasingly, personal satisfaction ranks high on the list of reasons. Employees, however, often find their new jobs also fail to offer an advanced level of personal enrichment. He likens this syndrome to a failed relationship. How many people walk away from one relationship only to make the same mistakes again in another? Whitely convincingly helps employees and their employers recognize unconscious patterns of attitude and behavior that mark unchallenging and passionless workplaces.

Sometimes, Whiteley says, employees live in fear that they will be downsized, discarded or laid off. They never develop their potential to enjoy their job because they go to work every day wondering, what next? Whitely encourages employees to see themselves as positive forces at work, responsible for their own level of job satisfaction.

Both employees and employers can benefit from Whiteley’s insights. In the competitive marketplace, he says, each employee, each CEO and each manager has to infuse the workplace with a spirit of energy. He offers a series of exercises and self-evaluations for employees. They should also be required reading for human resource professionals who watch long-time and long-sought employees walk out the door in search of the “perfect” opportunity.

Briefly noted Â¥ The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, one of design firm IDEO’s leaders, offers a rich and exciting ride through the mindset of a unique company. A leadership book with style, charisma and fun, this book also demonstrates how to capitalize on fresh ideas.

Â¥ Entrepreneur America: Lessons from Inside Rob Ryan’s High-Tech Start-Up Boot Camp by Rob Ryan. From Roaring Lion Ranch in Montana, the founder of Ascend Communications infuses this model of how to start a business with his unique humor, wit and practicality. Ryan shoots down entrepreneurial wannabes but goes on to tell them how to get up and continue the battle.

Â¥ The PR Crisis Bible: How to Take Charge of the Media When All Hell Breaks Loose by Robin Cohn is the definitive source for what to do when the worst case scenario unfolds at your company. How to handle public relations crisis, how to prepare for them and, most importantly, how to handle them honestly is the goal of this deft manual. Required reading for every CEO.

Sharon Secor, who helped jump-start two businesses, is a Nashville-based writer.

es for job seekers and employers It's that time of year again. The days are short and dreary; your job seems tedious and boring. Staggering mountains of holiday bills convince you that career advancement should be a springtime priority.

We've all seen the…

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