All posts tagged: BOOKS
To Make the Bed or Not? That is the Question
Have you noticed that all of a sudden the decision to make your bed every morning or not has become a litmus test for the kind of person you are? It’s actually a Thing now.
Money is the True Third Rail of Literature
When I first read “Bonfire of the Vanities” in the late 1980’s, the book’s protagonist, the bond trading Master of the Universe Sherman McCoy, struck me as very wealthy, a huge Wall Street success. I recently dipped back in to “Bonfire of the Vanities” as I was curious to measure Sherman’s financial success, circa 1987, against our current 2017 standards of what it means to be rich––our age of the TV show “Billions”, the Kardashians and the Trumps, and multi-million dollar birthday parties.
How to Travel the World in Style Never Checking a Bag
For more than 30 years, a hallmark of my professional life has been global travel. I spent 20 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention working to prevent the spread of health conditions affecting people around the world. I did the same for several years at the Gates Foundation and then for almost a decade I was the President and CEO of CARE, a leading international humanitarian and development organization (originator of CARE packages sent to Europe post-World War II), that operates in over 80 countries around the world. My travels took me from rich world capitals to the most rural villages in poor countries where the average person earns less than $2 a day. I would often have to hop off of planes ready to meet with high level government officials, including Heads of State and then take a long car ride to a remote village and meet with village officials and the community. And most evenings included obligatory and often quite ceremonial dinners. Also as a woman, often meeting with men …