Inspiring insights from an in-the-trenches leader.
Tulane University president emeritus Cowen reflects on elements of effective leadership in this guide aimed at students and early professionals.
For the author, whose 50-year academic career included a 16-year tenure as Tulane University’s president, “every teachable moment on my journey not only made me a better leader but also equipped me with the skills and qualities that I needed to cope with the unimaginable crisis that would end up defining the rest of my career: Hurricane Katrina.” In 10 conversational chapters, Cowen shares his own experiences and challenges (including his dyslexia, which remained undiagnosed until his early 20s) in the context of discussing precepts to “help you become the resilient, adaptive leader you need to be in a world of constant crises.” These include: stepping up and earning the respect of others (such as when he remained alongside staff and faculty who rode out Katrina on campus); cultivating mentors and mavericks in your advisory mix (a mentor gave Cowen a surprising yet critical push to leave an early limiting teaching job), and, most critically, “mobilizing people to accept the ‘new normal’ and focus on the silver linings” (in Cowen’s case, adding a public service requirement to Tulane’s curriculum following Katrina). Each chapter ends with “reflection” and “action” prompts to apply the author’s ideas in developing one’s own leadership capabilities. An esteemed educator who also served as interim president at Case Western during the Covid-19 pandemic, Cowen here is an appealingly down-to-earth Socratic sage guiding his target audience in assessing their own capacity for leadership. While most topics covered will likely be familiar to leadership guide readers, Cowen’s section on “adaptive leadership,” the focus of a course that he developed at Tulane, is particularly compelling—its six outlined principles (including “ensure inclusive, innovative, and thorough solution-finding”) are guideposts that any aspiring leader would do well to follow.
Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798891384101
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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