Musing from the impetuous 30something Cosmopolitan chronicles the modern life, personal commentaries and unconventional thoughts of a thirty-something professional woman on a quest to live life on her own terms.
Showing posts with label Extraordinary Omnibus (Books) and Scribes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Extraordinary Omnibus (Books) and Scribes. Show all posts
I read the book The Secret several years ago. It discusses the forces in the universe that impact the trajectory of ones life. Hence, One can skew those forces by ones thinking and actions. The essential theme is focus, prayer, meditation and karma can sway the forces in the universe in the direction you will it to. It takes effort, committment and determination. The book is incredibly inspiring. I received a tweet with the Optimist Creed that I'd like to share.
In the book The Secret has an optimist creed that I am trying to live by. However, in these distressing times I do fall short.
The Optimist’s Creed by Christian D. Larson
I promise myself
1. To be so strong that nothing can disturb my peace of mind. 2. To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person I meet. 3. To make all my friends feel that there is something worthwhile in them. 4. To look at the sunny side of everything and make my optimism come true. 5. To think only of the best, to work only for the best and to expect only the best. 6. To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as I am about my own. 7. To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. 8. To wear a cheerful expression at all times and give a smile to every living creature I meet. 9. To give so much time to improving myself that I have no time to criticize others. 10. To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble. 11. To think well of myself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud words, but in great deeds. 12. To live in the faith that the whole world is on my side, so long as I am true to the best that is in me.
If one has adequate operating income, Transformational Leadership out wits and trumps "Business As Usual" everytime. However, the lack there of, stunts growth and creates a vacuum effect; hobbling to the next month instead of bootstrapping. There is no greater examples of transformational leadership than the rise and fall of to big to fail corporations. As we watch startups zoom past the old gaurd, taking their marketshare in a single bound; as they slowly scurry to respond. IBM's lost opportunity has made Bill Gates the richest man on the planet, and SUPER philanthropist that's changing world. Google's arragance over Facebook provided Google a valuable lesson. One in which they will not let happen again. Frankly, it appears Google is apart of the new crowd. Therefore, they have taken note and acclimated; no resting on their laurels, and moving forward with Cloud (SaaS) and digital media properties that are leveling the playing the field for consumers and businesses. Whose being ignored now?
Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change. Her strategic and practical insights have guided leaders of large and small organizations worldwide for over 25 years, through teaching, writing, and direct consultation to major corporations and governments. The former Editor of Harvard Business Review (1989-1992), Professor Kanter has been named to lists of the "50 most powerful women in the world" (Times of London), and the "50 most influential business thinkers in the world" (Accenture and Thinkers 50 research). In 2001, she received the Academy of Management's Distinguished Career Award for her scholarly contributions to management knowledge, and in 2002 was named "Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year" by the World Teleport Association. Check her out on Facebook
Farai Chideya, author of THE COLOR OF OUR FUTURE said; "Veronica Chambers' HAVING IT ALL? is more than a collective biography of successful black women. The book is a history lesson about women who've transformed the cultural image from Aunt Jemima to uber-mogul Oprah Winfrey--and transformed America in turn. Most importantly, Chambers reveals the moments of self-transformation that happen in every black woman's life, through the stories of some of the most fascinating and accomplished people in America."
The Publisher Weekly wrote; In a series of interrelated essays, Chambers (Mama's Girl), explores the lives of middle- and upper-middle-class African-American women. Throughout, Chambers nicely weaves historical and literary anecdotes into her insightful narrative. While identifying this population as linchpins in the astronomical rise of a black middle class, she pursues such questions as how their "creative and indomitable spirit" translated into corporate reality while black men languish; why they no longer feel the need to choose allegiance between race and gender; what the image of Aunt Jemima declares about today's affluent African-American woman; and why they are more likely to be alone than any group of black women before them. Nonetheless, these women, Chambers says, have a strong sense of community and a renewed feeling of empowerment, which enables their transition into a predominantly white mainstream culture. Largely based on interviews of black women defying conventional perceptions, and written for those "who have crafted successful lives without role models or media coverage," the book lends a panoramic effect to such figures as former Whitney curator Thelma Golden, television host Star Jones, Barbara Bush's former press secretary Anna Perez, Anita Hill, and the growing population of African-American stay-at-home moms.
I do agree with both reviews. In addition, the book is entertaining but it lacks the multifarious dimension of the African American experience. The book is spoken from the voice of a first generation middle class African American, born during the intersect of opportunity and change. Therefore, the examples are primarily from the entertainment, media and politics of the 20th century. Of course, there is an entire history filled with African American role models found in the libraries, alumni associations and grounds of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). Even in our failures we can find answers to the mysteries of success by going back to the base; HBCU's. Gen-X'ers are the beneficiaries of women who came before us. Those determine women who who broke down the door, allowing Gen-X'ers to walk through and catapult ones self through the glass ceiling like Super Woman. Black Women are not pop culture super heros, but dignified, intelligent, enduring souls rooted in family and the pursuit of happiness. I like this book, as I do of all Veronica Chambers books. Had she of attended an HBCU the book might have a different voice with a longer list of women from all the industries. Black women carry the weight of the world on their backs. It's utterly fascinating how Chambers unravels those truths.
Thus far, Zadie Smith is one of the great writers of my generation. I read White Teeth and On Beauty. I love that she envelops who she is in the story line. The dysfunction and inadequacies which permeate through her family structure are often woven into the character she creates. Hence, the perils of the human experience make for good fiction. I am amused at her amazing comparative cultural antitheticals which seamlessly convey the symbiotic mural of life(one planet, one people, with cultural differences). Her British dry wit, clever sarcasm, illusive charm, and exhaustive imagery makes for great humor and a well develop plot leaving the reader wanting more. Zadie definitely exemplifies the typical Impetuous 30Something Cosmopolitan.
JANICE SIMPSON wrote in April 2006 TIME magazine wrote Zadie Smith's books. They arm wrestle, get in one another's faces and climb into one another's beds. Smith's precocious debut novel, White Teeth, published in 2000, just three years after she graduated from Cambridge, centers on two World War II buddies—a white working-class Brit married to a Jamaican Jehovah's Witness and a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh who imports what he thinks will be a traditional wife from the old country. But it's also the story of their children, who grow up, as Smith did, in a post-postcolonial London where the old gentlemen's agreements about class and race are being shredded. The book earned lavish critical praise, was turned into a TV mini-series and established a model for how to make sense—and art—out of the complexity, diversity and pluck that have defined the beginning of this century.
Smith, 30, likes to work big. Her narratives sprawl with Dickensian swagger. Her cultural references leap the high-low divide from John Milton to Eminem. Plus she's funny. Refugees from the era of political correctness and others who are easily offended probably should stay clear. Last year Smith published On Beauty, a novel set in the hothouse of American academia and scheduled to be made into a movie produced by Scott Rudin, who has adapted such provocative works as The Hours and Closer for the screen. Like White Teeth and her second novel, The Autograph Man it is simultaneously intellectual and visceral, a panoramic view of the way we live now.
Interview with Zadie in Stockholm 2006 Double click bottom arrow to view an interview with Zadie Smith in Stockholm the summer of 2006 when her book On Beauty had been translated into Swedish.
James Lasdun's review on the Novel "On Beauty" (Source: The Gaudian UK) I completely agree with the James Lasdun's review of Zadie Smith’s newest novel On Beauty. He wrote: among the many tasks Zadie Smith sets herself in her ambitious, hugely impressive new novel is that of finding a style at once flexible enough to give voice to the multitude of different worlds it contains, and sturdy enough to keep the narrative from disintegrating into a babel of incompatible registers. Its principal family alone, the Belseys, comprises its own little compact multiverse of clashing cultures: the father a white English academic, the mother a black Floridian hospital administrator, one son a budding Jesus freak, the other a would-be rapper and street hustler, the daughter a specimen of US student culture at its most rampagingly overdriven. Still more worlds open up beyond them as their lives unravel out through the genteel Massachusetts college town to which they have been transplanted: Haitian immigrants, hip-hop poets, New England liberal intelligentsia, reactionary black conservatives .
White Teeth had a similarly heterogenous cast, but whereas in that novel Smith kept it together by keeping it light, with a knockabout comic style (Dickens, by way of Rushdie and Martin Amis), here the intent is to live more inwardly with her characters, and the model, alluded to throughout, is EM Forster. Forster's style, which looks simultaneously backward to the epigrammatic polish of Jane Austen and forward to the looser, more discursive amplitude we favour today, resonates strongly in the leisured cadences and playful figuration of the many beautiful descriptions and gently ironic authorial interjections that frame and connect the bright pieces of Smith's mosaic. You can hear it in everything from the stately scene-setting passages (particularly where rooms or houses are being evoked) to the most incidental moments, for example where the lovelorn elder Belsey boy joins his mother and her middle-aged friends at an outdoor festival: "Jerome, in all his gloomy Jeromeity, had joined them. The ill-pitched greetings that compassionate age sings to mysterious youth rang out; hair was almost tousled then wisely not ... "
More specifically, the plot of Forster's Howards End, ingeniously re-engineered, underpins much of the storyline of On Beauty. The unruly Belseys, like Forster's Schlegels, become embroiled with another family whose conventional household seems the stolid opposite of their own. In both cases the wives form a surprising friendship that leads to a valuable legacy being bequeathed by one woman to the other. And in both cases the family of the deceased woman conceals the legacy from her surviving friend.
Orbiting in this capacity around the Belseys are the Kippses, presided over by Sir Monty Kipps, an orotund West Indian intellectual who delights in provoking liberals with his ultra-conservative views on homosexuality, affirmative action and so on. Sir Monty has written a popular appreciation of Rembrandt which Howard Belsey, himself an art historian, though of a more highbrow bent, has denounced for its retrogressive stance. Unfortunately his attack was marred by a factual error which Sir Monty has wasted no time in exploiting to maximum humiliating effect, and vague dislike on Howard's part has turned to boiling resentment, exacerbated by the fact that he has been unable to complete his own book, Against Rembrandt. To this self-inflicted injury the opening chapters add two choice insults: first Howard's elder son falls in love with Sir Monty's daughter Vee, and then Sir Monty is offered a visiting celebrity appointment at Wellington, the very college at which Howard himself teaches.
With the self-righteous Kippses thus plumped down on the doorstep of the self-sabotaging Belseys, the situation has the makings of a small-scale campus comedy with scope for all the familiar farcical posturings so dear to the heart of academe. But while Smith does indeed deliver a superbly wicked example of that genre, this is only a small part of her achievement. Large, Forsterian themes of friendship, marriage (the Belseys' is in crisis following Kiki Belsey's discovery that Howard has been unfaithful), social tension, artistic expression (from Rembrandt to Tupac) are meditated on with an unguarded seriousness rare in contemporary fiction, and to some extent the book could be seen as a rather heroic attempt to dignify contemporary life with a mirror held up in the grandly burnishing Bloomsbury manner.
But that isn't quite it either. The word "liminality", which a student of Howard's has to look up at one point (she would have found that it has to do with thresholds and boundaries), perhaps best expresses the driving idea of the novel and the source of its most powerful passages. These occur some way along, after the plot has been laid and the book begins coasting on its own momentum. They consist of a series of encounters in which the discrete worlds incarnated in these highly diverse characters start colliding and breaking each other open. At its most basic, the illumination that results is simply that of the surprise perspective - Levi Belsey applying his hip-hop worldview to a casual thought about Richard Branson: "Levi liked the way the mythical British guy who owned the brand was like a graffiti artist, tagging the world ... " But in its more sustained form this collision principle becomes a way of taking apart and investigating elemental human configurations: parent and child, teacher and student (some of the most sensitive writing I've read on what actually goes on in this particular relationship), black and white, employer and employee.
A degree of psychological violence is always implicit in such mutual broachings: Kiki Belsey's gravitation toward Carlene Kipps is a betrayal of her own husband; minor, but forceful enough to set off a cascade of reappraisals of both Howard and herself in her own mind. Sometimes the impact sets off a whole ricocheting chain of further encounters. Howard Belsey, usually armoured with a sneer (or a snore) against anything overtly "sublime" in art, becomes unexpectedly overwhelmed when a choir breaks into Mozart's Ave Verum at Carlene Kipps's funeral in London. He reels out of the church, the shock of mortality reverberating in his head, and finds himself wandering toward his childhood home in Cricklewood, where his father, whom he hasn't seen for years, still lives. Here, as the conciliatory impulse gives way to ancient antagonisms, a still more devastating confrontation takes place, and Howard careens off again, first to a pub, then to Carlene's wake where, drunk and dazed, he allows himself to be seduced in an upstairs room by ... well, by about the last person on earth he should be allowing himself to be seduced by.
A further pleasure of these charged encounters is the extraordinary vividness with which they have been imagined. Beautifully observed details of clothing, weather, cityscapes and the bustling human background of drivers, shoppers and passers-by are constantly being folded into the central flow of thought, feeling and action, giving even the most mundane moments - Levi riding a bus into Boston, Howard setting up a projector - a dense, pulsing life.
There are flaws, of course (and not just the portentous title). The beginning feels awkward: remnants of an older style full of grabby italics and wisecracking dialogue sit uncomfortably alongside the richer, more complex tone that takes over. Fussily choreographed bits of physical action (such as Howard showing off hip-hop moves to the gleeful horror of his kids) give some of the early family scenes a sitcom feeling - not so much visualised as televisualised. The plot clunks a bit at first, too: a laboriously contrived trip to London premised on some unconvincing business about a lost address book; the convenient coincidence of Sir Monty being offered a job at Howard's college. More seriously, some of the characters appear blurry or under-drawn - especially Kiki Belsey, who seems intended to embody a kind of feelingful alternative to Howard's hyper-intellectuality but never quite comes out from behind the enormous bosom with which her creator has a little too symbolically endowed her. Also Sir Monty, who's fun, but too cartoonish for his inevitable exposure as a hypocrite to pack much of a punch.
But with so much done so extremely well, it seems ungrateful to dwell on imperfections. Numerous virtues more than make up for them: characters such as Claire Malcolm, an east coast poet/intellectual portrayed with a stunningly accurate feeling for the type. Or Carl, a sharp, touching study of a ghetto teenager making good, done with all the volatile political and sexual currents set in motion by such a progress. Or Howard Belsey himself, who starts out like an escapee from a Malcolm Bradbury novel but whose limitless capacity for folly keeps deepening and strangely sweetening his character. Above all, just the sheer novelistic intelligence - expansive, witty and magnanimous - that irradiates the whole enterprise.
James Lasdun's The Horned Man is published by Vintage
=======>About the Author======>(Source: Wikapedia) Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith (she changed her name when she was 14) in the northwest London borough of Brent – a largely working-class area – to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne McLean, and an English father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and immigrated to England in 1969. It was her father's second marriage. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper Doc Brown. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager.
As a child she was fond of tap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actress in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist. Literature, however, came to be her principal interest.
Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature.[1] In an interview with the Guardian in 2000, Smith was keen to correct a recent newspaper assertion that she left Cambridge with a double First. "Actually, I got a Third in my Part Ones", she said. At Cambridge she published a number of short stories in a collection of student writing (see Short stories) called the May Anthologies. These attracted the attention of a publisher who offered her a contract for her first novel. Smith decided to contact a literary agent and was taken on by the Wylie Agency on the basis of little more than a first chapter.
White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, long before it was completed. On the basis of a partial script an auction among different publishers for the rights started, with Hamish Hamilton being successful. Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel became a bestseller immediately. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards (see Novels).
In interviews she reported that the hype surrounding her first novel had caused her to suffer a short spell of writer's block. Nevertheless, her second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although the critical response was not as unanimously positive as it had been to White Teeth.
After the publication of The Autograph Man, Smith visited the United States as a 2002–2003 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University. [1] She started work on a book of essays, The Morality of the Novel, in which she considers a selection of 20th century writers through the lens of moral philosophy.
Her third novel, On Beauty, was published in September 2005 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The book won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Smith met Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in the Chapel of King's College. Smith dedicated On Beauty "for my dear Laird." Laird has published a collection of poems, To a Fault, and a novel, Utterly Monkey, early in 2005. The couple lives in North London, UK.
I read both of Barak Obama’s books, “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope”, Thought on Reclaiming the American Dream. In doing so, one can clearly understand who he is, learn of his pesonal development to manhood, his high level of integrity, reveals his incredibly hight intelligence, his willingness to listen, compassion, patience, and objective to preservng human life, help families create the american dream with his plan for the future.
The MICHIKO KAKUTANI 2006 New York Times review of the “Audacity of Hope” states my sentiments exactly, a poignant moving and genuine book about himself and explain his perspectives on life, humanity, the world, peace efforts, the war, and the American dream with no spin, all heart.
Michik wrote:
His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” written before Mr. Obama entered politics, provided a revealing, introspective account of his efforts to trace his family’s tangled roots and his attempts to come to terms with his absent father, who left home when he was still a toddler. That book did an evocative job of conjuring the author’s multicultural childhood: his father was from Kenya, his mother was from Kansas, and the young Mr. Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.
And it was equally candid about his youthful struggles: pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,” he wrote, could “push questions of who I was out of my mind,” flatten “out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.” Most memorably, the book gave the reader a heartfelt sense of what it was like to grow up in the 1960’s and 70’s, straddling America’s color lines: the sense of knowing two worlds and belonging to neither, the sense of having to forge an identity of his own.
Mr. Obama’s new book, “The Audacity of Hope” — the phrase comes from his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, which made him the party’s rising young hope — is much more of a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech, and the bulk of it is devoted to laying out Mr. Obama’s policy positions on a host of issues, from education to health care to the war in Iraq.
But while Mr. Obama occasionally slips into the flabby platitudes favored by politicians, enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in “Dreams From My Father,” an elastic, personable voice that is capable of accommodating everything from dense discussions of foreign policy to streetwise reminiscences, incisive comments on constitutional law to New-Agey personal asides. The reader comes away with a feeling that Mr. Obama has not reinvented himself as he has moved from job to job (community organizer in Chicago, editor of The Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, state senator) but has instead internalized all those roles, embracing rather than shrugging off whatever contradictions they might have produced.
Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life.
He recalls a meet-and-greet encounter at the White House with George W. Bush, who warmly shook his hand, then “turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.” (“Good stuff,” he quotes the president as saying, as he offered his guest some. “Keeps you from getting colds.”) And he recounts a trip he took through Illinois with an aide, who scolded him for asking for Dijon mustard at a T.G.I. Friday’s, worried the senator would come across as an elitist; the confused waitress, he adds, simply said: “We got Dijon if you want it.”
In his 2004 keynote address Mr. Obama spoke of the common ground Americans share: “There is not a Black America and White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” And the same message — rooted in his own youthful efforts to grapple with racial stereotypes, racial loyalty and class resentments — threads its way through the pages of this book. Despite the red state-blue state divide, despite racial, religious and economic divisions, Mr. Obama writes, “we are becoming more, not less, alike” beneath the surface: “Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa. The political labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people’s personal attributes.”
Mr. Obama eschews the Manichean language that has come to inform political discourse, and he rejects what he sees as the either-or formulations of his elders who came of age in the 60’s: “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage. The victories that the 60’s generation brought about — the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority — have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans.”
His thoughts on domestic and foreign policy try to hew to this consensus-building line. Some of his recommendations devolve into little more than fuzzy statements of the obvious: i.e., that America’s “addiction to oil” is affecting the economy and undermining national security, or that the education system needs to be revamped and improved. Others echo Bill Clinton’s “third way,” methodically triangulating between traditionally conservative and traditionally liberal ideas.
Mr. Obama writes that “conservatives — and Bill Clinton — were right about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old A.F.D.C. program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self respect.”
He uses the Bush administration’s tough language to talk about national security in the age of terrorism (“if we have to go it alone, the American people stand ready to pay any price and bear any burden to protect our country”) but adds, crucially, that “once we get beyond matters of self-defense,” he is “convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we use force around the world.”
He assails President Bush for waging an unnecessary and misguided war in Iraq and for promoting an “Ownership Society” that “magnifies the uneven risks and rewards of today’s winner-take-all economy.” Yet he also takes the Democrats to task for becoming “the party of reaction”: “In reaction to a war that is ill-conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lose the courts and wait for a White House scandal.”
This volume does not possess the searching candor of the author’s first book. But Mr. Obama strives in these pages to ground his policy thinking in simple common sense — be it “growing the size of our armed forces to maintain reasonable rotation schedules” or reining in spending and rethinking tax policy to bring down the nation’s huge deficit — while articulating these ideas in level-headed, nonpartisan prose. That, in itself, is something unusual, not only in these venomous pre-election days, but also in these increasingly polarized and polarizing times.
