Review by Choice Review
Sheryl Sandberg is a woman of impressive credentials: she is chief operating officer of Facebook and one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world, and is on the Fortune list of 50 most powerful women in business. In Lean In, Sandberg looks at the current stark reality of women in leadership. In 1980, more than 50 percent of college graduates were women, yet women still make up just over 4 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and fewer than 18 percent of elected officials; the gap is even greater for women for color. In this well-researched and exceptionally accessible text, Sandberg presents solid research findings, blended masterfully with personal stories and experiences of her own and of other women. An engaging read, this book pushes at the perceived notion that women have "made it" and encourages women, and men, to change the conversation--or sometimes to have the courage to begin the conversation--about how society is "failing to encourage women to aspire to leadership." Sandberg invites the reader to consider the possibility and requirements of a more equal world for both women and men. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels and collections. T. M. Mckenzie Gonzaga University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
When Alysia Abbott was a child, she constructed a fairy tale of sorts from the shards of her family's short life together. Barbara Binder, beautiful Smith College graduate and aspiring psychologist, and Steve Abbott, conscientious objector and budding writer, had been an ideal match. Drawn together by radical politics while master's candidates at Emory University, they were married in Atlanta in 1969. Late the next year, Alysia-Rebeccah was born. "We lived happily," she writes in her memoir, "Fairyland," hewing to her childhood fantasy, "until, one night late in the summer of 1973, my mother was out driving when her car was rear-ended. She flew into the street, was hit by a car and was killed instantly." Father and daughter soon moved to San Francisco, where Steve ventured with passion and determination into the local literary scene. He also shed the last pretense of heterosexuality and took up with a series of young men who, like him, found a gay never-never land in the City by the Bay. Through it all, Alysia clung fast to her origin story: perfect love, a happy family and the random accident that rent the cozy unit. As for her father's homosexuality, she told herself that this too was an accident, a kind of conversion through grief. In 1992, when Steve Abbott died of AIDS-related complications, his voluminous journals told a rather less convenient truth. "Fairyland" is his daughter's compassionate, cleareyed reckoning with this truth and many others that defined her singular girlhood at the dawn of the gay liberation movement. Stupid hope is what Alysia's flinty grandmother called the giddy optimism of youth. It was that same naïveté, searching and exuberant, that the author remembers her father displaying during their early days in California. Escaped from a strait-laced Nebraska upbringing, he was at last "his naked and profane self" in San Francisco, and nothing, not even fatherhood, would stand in the way of his progress. While Alysia colored or daydreamed, Dad tried out his poetry for audiences at the Cloud House. While Alysia watched TV or slept (sometimes in an empty apartment), Dad went looking for love at bars and bathhouses. Roommates - drag queens, addicts, Steve's occasional boyfriends - came and went. So did apartments. Loading their belongings in an increasingly geriatric VW bug, the Abbotts crisscrossed town, settling at last in a funky Victorian on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. When Alysia noticed a mushroom sprouting from the back seat of the VW, Steve wrote a poem about it that celebrated the "creative regimen of poverty." Alysia takes great pains to emphasize her father's loving if imperfect parental skills. Still, it was a chaotic and often lonely existence for Alysia, bobbing about in the "defiantly motherless" world of the "post-hippie" Haight. Harvey Milk and Anita Bryant were central characters in her consciousness as she marched with her father in the city's Gay Pride parade. But at school, she succumbed to a profound sense of otherness when "Fairyland's untidy corners stuck out from beneath the closet door." Abbott's writing is at its best describing the throes of adolescence. Living by her wits, she learned to deflect questions about her father's sexuality. And she became deft at wheedling invitations to classmates' houses for home-cooked meals. Her father "was always generous with hugs and encouragement." Still, certain lessons - hygiene, other feminine mysteries - would come from exasperated friends. And ultimately, Steve's unorthodoxies mortified his teenage daughter. Even in San Francisco, it's hard to be weird in high school. "Fairyland" is an elegy of sorts, written two decades after a father's death by a woman who is now a parent herself. Experience, and no small amount of rue, frame Abbott's narrative, particularly in the final sections of the book. In 1991, Alysia was a senior at New York University when her dying father called her home. AIDS had cut a swath through San Francisco; the community that had once embraced the widower and motherless girl was dying too. In the poet's final year, Alysia cared for him with the same impatient, imperfect, but abiding love on which she'd been raised. He bequeathed her little but his work, which counts among its lines: Come morning I'll be the only good fairy Left in town. Alexandra Styron is the author, most recently, of "Reading My Father."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 7, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* If Facebook COO (and first-time author) Sandberg succeeds, it will be because she's made us mad and more than willing to act. With no small amount of self-deprecating humor, a massive quantity of facts and research, plus a liberal dose of very personal anecdotes, Sandberg forces each one of us woman and man to reexamine ourselves at work and in life, using a unique filter. Are we more concerned about being liked than succeeding? Do we think of our career as a series of upward ladders rather than a jungle gym? Do our authentic selves and honesty show up in business? In short, every single undoing of a woman's career is examined thoughtfully and with twenty-first-century gentleness and exposed with recommended remedies. Her colleagues act as advocates for her theme: lean in, or take a risk and drive change for us all. And though there are no solutions offered, except in the formation of communities around the country and (we hope!) around the world, there's tremendous reenergy in feeling that, thanks to Sandberg, the world just might be a different place.--Jacobs, Barbara Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Facebook COO Sandberg examines the dearth of women in major leadership positions, and what women can do to solve the problem, in this provocative tome. While acknowledging that women have made great strides in the business world, she posits that they still have a long way to go and lays out a plan for women to get there. "I have written this book to encourage women to dream big, forge a path through the obstacles, and achieve their full potential," she explains. The author's counsel-gleaned from her own experiences-includes suggestions for increasing self-confidence, particularly in the business world; understanding the role of mentors and how to identify them; building emotional relationships at work; not focusing on being liked; juggling marriage and children with a demanding job; and the importance of taking risks. "Hard work and results should be recognized by others, but when they aren't, advocating for oneself becomes necessary," Sandberg opines. A new generation of women will learn from Sandberg's experiences, and those of her own generation will be inspired by this thoughtful and practical book. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Facebook COO Sandberg uses hard data, examples from personal experience, and decades of observation to support her assertion that competent women unintentionally hold themselves back from career advancement and personal happiness. She furthers states that hard work is not enough and that it never has been. Elisa Donovan's narration brings an effective voice to Sandberg's practical advice for both professional women (take more risks and do not be so silent about the risks) and any male managers or executives (look for and recognize women's contributions; encourage women to "sit at the table"). verdict This title should be encouraged reading for all working women as well as all members of management. ["A lively book on a topic relevant to all working women as well as the men they work with (and for). There will be interest because of the author's renown," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Knopf hc, LJ 4/1/13.-Ed.]-M. Gail Preslar, formerly with Business Lib., Eastman Chemical Co., Kingsport, TN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Facebook COO Sandberg (ranked fifth in Forbes' 2011 list of the most powerful women in the world) reveals how gender discrimination still operates against her and other less-fortunate women. When she learned about the list, she reports, "I felt embarrassed and exposed." Even in her position, she still felt the pressure of social conditioning, the expectation that women should subordinate themselves to men. Taking examples from her own experience, Sandberg shows how expected gender roles work against women seeking top jobs, even though they now earn "63 percent of the master's degrees in the United States." Not only are women forced to juxtapose family and job responsibilities, but they face more subtle pressures. From early childhood, females are discouraged from being assertive. "Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct," writes the author. While it is assumed that men who are committed to their families can have successful careers, for women, the choices are more difficult due to the fact that they will usually be the primary caregivers. The failure of social provisions--extended family leave, flexible working hours, etc., which are the norm in many European countries--make life especially difficult for middle-income families (and single parents) due to the high cost of good child care. Women internalize this, frequently making career decisions to accommodate their expectation of the demands that will be imposed by having a family in the future. In Sandberg's case, this involved rejecting a desirable international fellowship. She argues the need for a redefinition of gender roles so that men expect to share primary responsibility for child care, parents receive social support to accommodate work and family responsibilities, and stereotyping of male and female behavior is recognized as pernicious. A compelling case for reforms that support family values in the continuing "march toward true equality."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
