A wide-ranging and clear-eyed look at how higher-ed leaders can bring about meaningful change.
Felix offers a guide to the best ways to approach the many challenges facing higher education today, aimed at college and university administrators.
In these pages, the author draws on his work in design and education consulting to advise higher-ed decision-makers. Each chapter is aimed at a different audience—college presidents, admissions officials, institutional researchers, library staff, athletic department heads, or facilities managers. Anecdotes from Northern Kentucky University, Alverno College, and Boise State University serve as proofs of concepts, and advice from leaders at Colorado State University, Macalester College, and George Washington University provide direction and context. Felix recommends that campus leaders establish “skunkworks” teams that can take a more unfettered approach to problem-solving than traditional committees, and he also encourages cross-functional partnerships to accomplish goals, ending each chapter with a list of departments that one should include in one’s plans. A key thread running throughout the book is the “student-centered mindset”: the idea that colleges should adapt to the needs and abilities of the current student population instead of longing for students as they once were, a decade or a generation ago. According to the author, this means “redesigning your institution to be ready to help today’s students thrive rather than lamenting that students aren’t college ready.” Overall, the book is both encouraging and challenging, assuring its readership that change is possible while also demonstrating that effort and creativity are required to develop and implement successful programs and get commitment from stakeholders. The writing is solid and straightforward, and the book’s structure allows it to work as well when read straight through or selectively by section. Felix’s detailed citations provide readers with plenty of additional information about various initiatives and strategies. The author’s enthusiasm for his subject is evident throughout, making it easy for readers to believe it’s possible to overcome institutional inertia for the benefit of everyone—especially the students.
A wide-ranging and clear-eyed look at how higher-ed leaders can bring about meaningful change.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798992077445
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Wise Ink Creative Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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