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Loading... King of Nod: Some Things Never Dieby Scott Fad
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Success is often just a moment--a goal fulfilled, soon to be replaced with new goals. But failure is the ambitious person′s constant companion, often dogging us for months, years or even decades before we finally reach our aim. Siimon Reynolds transformed himself from a directionless twenty-something (in his own words, "one of the most disorganized people I′ve ever known") into the founder of one of the largest marketing services firms in the world by identifying the habits that lead people down the wrong path and then by consciously avoiding them. In Why People Fail, he draws on that experience to explore the main causes of failure and presents proven strategies and tips for defeating the sixteen most common behaviors that lead to failure such as destructive thinking, low productivity, not asking the right questions, holding on to a fixed mindset, not following daily rituals, and more. Surprising, entertaining, and inspiring, Why People Fail will you help you drop the behaviors that hold you back and reach your full potential for success in your professional and personal life. No library descriptions found. |
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I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Lots of comparisons to Stephen King get made about this story...the setting of a landscape ripe with thoughtless change, irritating the spirits of the place; lush, descriptive language; an outsider who Just Knows he isn't who he's been told he is; and as far as it goes, all of those are accurate assessments of this read.
What doesn't get a lot of airplay is how much like King the bloated, self-indulgent length of the book is.
Robert Lee "Boo" Taylor is our PoV character. The putative son of the town doctor in Low Country Sweetgrass Island, South Carolina, he never settles in to his identity. Spoiler alert: It's much more fraught a topic than he was led to believe. Notice, please, his uber-Southern names (if they aren't obvious to you, google them) and their cultural resonances. As I think being thumped on the nose this way is not my idea of fun, I was ready to move on from this read very quickly.
But here the more positive resonances with King kicked in. I found the first 45% hard to read but hard to quit. This is a lot like my response to King's Pet Sematary. I did finish both books, this one no more sluggishly than King's. Both ended up being what, for this materialist reader, on the unsettling side but never frightening the way, say, Sundial was. Any time we start talking about Eeeville from Beyond, I get impatient. But the parts about family, the cruelty of the ignorant, the burden of being Other in a small place...those I relate to and enjoy.
Would I read it again? No. Was my time wasted? No. I'd recommend someone cutting at least 200 pages to whip up the pace. The author has definite promise, with ideas that are worth exploring and a good eye for the details that can immerse one into the book's world. The fact is, though, these same details were splashed on so liberally that I felt submerged in a vat of Old Spice. Cut, cut, cut, and emerge with a possible world-beater. ( )