A detailed and relatable career manual.
Business strategist and public speaker Palmer offers Black women a guidebook to climbing the corporate ladder.
The author notes that she quickly learned, while working in a corporate setting, that the “workplace wasn’t a meritocracy; it was a chessboard” on which many Black women were never taught all the moves. This book opens with Palmer’s own story, from when she received a full-tuition scholarship at an elite private college at age 16 to when she experienced early success in health care administration. Although a corporate leadership position gave her a confidence boost, she came to believe that the cutthroat world of American business was a “rigged” game, designed to marginalize Black women like herself. Addressing her book to “the sisterhood of Black women in corporate America,” Palmer shares her advice for navigating unwritten rules of the workplace: “The few times I tried to question the structure and why certain people were always in the room,” she recalls, “I quickly saw the costs.” The book notes the difficult terrain that Black women must navigate (“You might find yourself working twice as hard yet told you’re barely meeting expectations”) and offers practical advice on how to maintain one’s professional reputation, increase one’s visibility without risking overexposure, and identify and protect oneself from workplace adversaries. The book’s self-empowerment message is careful to emphasize that Black women may succeed in their careers “not by changing who [they] are,” but by leveraging their skills in the context of business politics. Palmer, whose work has been featured in Writer’s Digest and Black Enterprise, among other national publications, has a writing style that blends realistic assessment of race relations with an optimistic, confidence-building message. Her emphasis on reader engagement is aided by accessible organization, with each chapter featuring easy-to-understand lists, concluding summaries, and questions for reflection.
A detailed and relatable career manual.Pub Date: May 12, 2025
ISBN: 9798992199420
Page Count: 384
Publisher: SmallPub
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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