Book Reviews

By Nathaniel Philbrick

All I want to do now is go to Boston with this book and my brother Steve, and go to every place mentioned to see how our revolution came to be. This book has been sitting on my shelf for so long I forgot when and where I bought it. But I am thrilled to say I finished it and am pleasantly surprised how well the author walked me through the events and characters.

Boston is not the same geographic city it was in the 1700’s and I found myself pulling up google maps to compare to the maps in the book from the 1700’s. My memory of the history of Bunker Hill was fuzzy from my history class in high school (along with a lot of other fuzzy memories 🙂 from that time) and Nathaniel Philbrick brought it back to life for me and filled in so many details.

Not the least of which is that we lost a famous Patriot in Dr. Joseph Warren in the battle at Bunker Hill. He was a committee chair and leader of the movement against the British with Samuel Adams and others. He was also a prominent physician but wanted to be at the front lines of battle. One comment in the book that struck me was that if he had lived, that it is possible that George Washington would not have been our first president! I need to learn more about this man.

For you history buffs and New Englanders out there, get this book. I’m keeping this one.

This is the second book in his Beartown trilogy about a small town in the middle of nowhere Scandinavia. Whew…I need a break because this book does not stop from page 1 to the end. The characters are real people struggling with real issues that just don’t seem to stop. The biggest issue? The local hockey teams. One in Beartown and one in HED. But wait, there’s more.

Backman develops so many characters in this book and shares their struggles with the reader to the level where you can’t help but feel sorry for some, angry at others, and crying with others. If you think you know what this book is about on pages 1, 50, 100, 200, or even at the end…you don’t. 

A great writer and storyteller of people. I am going to wait a month or so before I dive into the third book of the trilogy and read something lighter, like the Battle of Bunker Hill.

J.P. has written this book for career service providers and provides us with a different lens to look at the career development process. It is not about what do you want to be, but what challenges do you want to take on. He introduces us to the challenge mindset and how we can be career catalysts rather than career matchers.

The inherent problem with trait-factor theory is that it is biased to what we know. It is why so many people choose professions similar to their parents. JP encourages us to ask “What challenges do you want to take on?” And you can do that by using his Challenge Card Sort, or by having the student/client flip through magazines or websites to find articles that are interesting to them. (He has other suggestions too).

This challenge mindset flips the career process from (1) what interests do I have (2) match them to occupations (3) research them, (4) find a company that has an opening, to (1) what challenges do I want to address (2) what companies are dealing with that challenge  (3) who within that company is doing something that looks interesting to me (4) find a way to get close to that job by doing an information interview or internship, or volunteer, or whatever they can do to learn more. Then let “intentional serendipity” bring the job to them.

I love this model because most people can only name 30-100 job titles and there are 20,000+ job titles out there and more coming daily. So when people come to us and want to choose a job title, it really is not effective. Choose a challenge and find out who is working on it, and then explore the various occupations within that challenge.

This is a practical, easy-to-read book with great examples which help the reader understand what JP is writing about. Each chapter ends with a section titled Take Action with specific action steps you can take to tie the ideas from the chapter and put them into practice.

The challenge mindset embraces so many concepts I believe in. The two most important to me are, giving the client ownership of the process, and embracing Intentional serendipity i.e. taking action and being open to discovering something by accident.

If you are a career service provider or a person who is looking to make a change in their career, this book is a great place to start your journey. There is no assessment to take that will tell you what to do. But there is a new way of thinking that can help you discover what you want to give to the world.

You can find more information on the Challenge Card sorts and JP’s work at https://mysparkpath.com/

Here is a list of books recommended from my fellow book-readers. I’ve include comments if they did also. *The person who recommended the book is in parenthesis)

• The Infinite Game, by Simon Sinek (Scott Woodard)
• Awaken Your Genius, by Ozan Varol (Scott Woodard)
• Tomorrowmind, by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman & Martin Seligman (Scott Woodard)
• In Defense of Troublemakers,” by Charlan Nemeth (Scott Woodard)
• Coaching Career Clients on Salary and other Workplace Negotiations, by Karen Chopra (Jan Hodges Coville)
• Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet by Michelle R. Weise, PhD (Meg Gerry)
• The Search by Bruce Feiler (Ray Giese and Scott Woodard)
•  The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills by Jessie Singal that challenges the acceptance of pop psychology just because it becomes popular. (Barry Davis)
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, noting how the Internet is reducing our ability to focus (Barry Davis)
• Switchers, Dawn Graham (Kristen McLaughlin, Holly Smevog, Meg Gerry all recommend)
• YouMap by KRISTIN A. SHERRY (Kristen McLaughlin)
• Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra (Kristen McLaughlin)
• Modernize Your Executive Job Search by Louise Kursmark and Jan Melnik (Kristen McLaughlin)
• Dirty Work by Press is important book about some of those essential workers society loved for a hot minute (Brian Hutchinson)
• Stolen Focus by Hari is super informative about the next skill CDPs need to learn to teach – attention (Brian Hutchinson)
• The Burnout Society by Han is the most important philosophy work for career dev I have read in more than a decade (Brian Hutchinson)
• A History of America in 10 Strikes is important context for the age of union ascendancy we are finally in (Brian Hutchinson)
• “Mindset” by Dr. Carol Dweck! (Sujata Ives)
• Career Recovery” by Spencer Niles, Norman Amundson, Roberta Neault, Hyung Joon Yoon. (Sujata Ives)
• Books by Dr. Imants Jaunaraj (Sujata Ives)
  Example: Brain-Based Career Development theory booklet offered through NACE (Jim Peacock)
• The Career Change Guide: Five Steps to Finding Your Dream Job by Rachel Schofield https://a.co/d/flvV5jL (Celeste Wroblewski)
• Career Coach GPT: The Complete Guide to ChatGPT Resume, Cover Letter, Interview, and Job Search Success by Jeremy Schifeling https://a.co/d/bzu36Sk (Celeste Wroblewski)
• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Ed Lawrence)
• Modernize Your Executive Job Search by Louise Kursmark is a hidden gem! (Celeste Wroblewski)
• Atomic Habits (Sabrina Woods)
• Quit (Sabrina Woods)
• “Human Work” by Jaime Meriosotis (Sujata Ives)
• Killers of the Flowers Moon (Richard Steers)

Jim Peacock is the Principal at Peak-Careers Consulting and writes a weekly email for career practitioners. Peak-Careers offers discussion-based online seminars for career practitioners focused on meeting continuing education needs for CCSP, GCDF and BCC certified professionals as well as workshops for career practitioners and individual career coaching.

He is the author of A Field Guide for Career Practitioners: Helping Your Clients Create Their Next Move and The Adventure of Finding Me in New Zealand. He is also the recipient of the 2020 Kenneth C. Hoyt Award from the National Career Development Association and the Mid-Atlantic Career Counseling Association’s Professional Contribution’s Award in 2020.

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