A Trip Back In Time to China

Reviewed by Stuart Nachbar

In 1977, when I was a junior in high school, Roots was the first family legacy series I had read. I was motivated to read the book after I had learned so much from the TV series. The series spanned several generations of a black family immigrating to the United States and surviving slavery to eventually prosper on their own. Released nearly a decade after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Roots won nine Emmy Awards and the finale is the third-highest rating television program ever. The movie and book were factually disputed at the time, but I learned much from the story.

Return to Middle Kingdom

Thirty one years later, Yuan-Tsung Chen, a former Cornell University professor writes a different and more personal family legacy. Chen’s work, Return to the Middle Kingdom, spans 150 years of Chinese history and politics, through the eyes of her late husband, his father and grandfather. Like Roots, it has potential to be reworked into a movie or epic series; as Americans, we must gain more understanding of the nation that holds so many keys to our economic future.

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Getting from College to Career

Virtual Book Review Network interview with Lindsey Pollak, author of Getting From College to Career

How do you get a job without experience and get experience without a job? It's the question virtually every college student or recent graduate faces. In Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World, Lindsey Pollak offers the first definitive guide to building the experience, skills, and confidence grads need before they start their first major job search.

Getting from College to Career

About the author: Lindsey Pollak is a writer, editor, and speaker specializing in career advice for young professionals. She is the coauthor of two career advice books and has written for Marie Claire magazine and Metro New York newspaper. Lindsey frequently speaks at universities and corporations across the country. She is a graduate of Yale University. Learn more at: http://www.lindseypollak.com/blog.

LAUREN SMITH: What inspired you to write Getting From College to Career – your own experiences, the experiences of others, or a little of both?

Lindsey Pollak:
Getting From College to Career is the book I wish I’d had when I was in college. It’s the book I wish my younger brother and sister had. It’s a collection of all of the tips, ideas, advice, secrets, strategies and warnings that I didn’t even know I didn’t know.

It has also launched a dream career for me—working as an author and speaker helping college students and young professionals. My senior year of college I was a freshman counselor (resident advisor), living with and advising a group of freshman students. To this day it was my favorite job I’ve ever had—and this book provided the opportunity to continue this work. As a counselor I learned that helping students build confidence and a sense of themselves is just as important as teaching them specific skills. That’s the attitude I brought to writing Getting From College to Career—compassion for this very challenging and scary time of life, and a desire to help each student/reader find his or her own path and not fixate on what a recent graduate “should” do. I think of the book’s readers as extensions of the freshmen I counseled in college. My goal was to be a big sister to the reader—young enough to relate to their time of life and old enough to have some wisdom and perspective to share.

LAUREN SMITH: Do you think today’s college graduates face bigger challenges than ever before; if so why and what are those challenges?

Lindsey Pollak:
In many ways, yes. Demographically, there are simply more young people today, who are more educated and who more aware of available opportunities and global competition because of the Internet. Millennials are building careers in a time of tremendous competition, but also unprecedented global opportunity. I think it’s incredibly exciting!

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