Showing posts with label memoirs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memoirs. Show all posts

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Nigel Marsh : from Overworked and Underlaid to work-life balance nirvana


Marsh is a British expatriate living in Sydney and working a high-profile job. Like any hard-working man with a family, he finds himself struggling with that old chestnut of work-life balance.

Marsh first recounts how he re-discovers himself in Fat, Forty & Fired and goes on to share more snippets of his life in Observations of a Very Short Man. Now in the follow-up book Overworked and Underlaid he tackles head-on the challenges of juggling his commitments to work and family.

His books are unlike the garden-variety self-help books. They are memoirs of contemporary life from a male point-of-view with ideas and inspirations distilled from personal encounters and innermost feelings. Marsh is also a guest motivational speaker. In the same vein, he punctuates his flowing narrative style with wit, humour and insights which make his books quick, easy and so enjoyable to read.

Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work



Wednesday, February 02, 2011

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

'A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier' by Ishmael Beah is a poignant tale of a child solider in Sierra Leone. At the age of twelve, Ishmael Beah lost his family and his childhood to a raging, violent civil war. Drafted into the army, Beah was fed drugs, wielded guns, and was witness to the horrific fighting that was the result of a country in turmoil. Beah would spend years in this seemingly parallel world, where boys were men, men were monsters, and life was worthless.


Luckily for Beah, he was removed from the fighting by UNICEF and sent on the long hard road to rehabilitation. Beah learned again to live, laugh and love. To return to the happy, kind-spirited boy he used to be. However, many children do not have this chance.


Ishmael Beah is now 26 years old and lives in New York City. In 2004 he graduated from Oberlin College with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. He has spoken before the United Nations and many other NGO's in an attempt to bring awareness to the plight of more than 300,000 child soldiers still left fighting in more than 50 conflicts around the globe.
He is also the President and Founder of The Ishmael Beah Foundation, which aims to help the rehabilitation of former child soldiers and ease their return to normal lives.