CHAPTERS: Create a Life of Exhilaration and Accomplishment in the Face of Change

If you've been fired or are just feeling restless in your job, Carpenter is here to tell you there's nothing wrong with you. You're part of the new world where people go through four to five distinctly different careers and eight to 10 different jobs in the course of a lifetime. Between careers, they also take time to concentrate on their families, do volunteer work or simply regroup for their next career shift. Carpenter terms these changes "chapters" because they have distinct beginnings and endings. Her own genuinely encouraging chapters take the reader through the various stages of closing an old chapter and opening a new one. Carpenter offers advice on how to recognize when "The Gig Is Up" (being fired can be a powerful clue), how not to panic but to take the time to find out what you really want to do next (her advice to always have enough money on hand to be able to live without a paycheck for a full year won't seem practical to many readers, however). She also talks about the need for companies and managers to embrace their employees' desires to open new chapters. The book works more as inspiration than as a true road map, using anecdotes from the lives of the many high-flying execs Carpenter has known (Barry Diller, with whom she worked on Q2; Michael Milkin; Bob Pittman) as well as her own. Carpenter's background is from a world in which a driver is a necessity, the doorman at Versace knows her by name and the next job comes with a corner office and the title of CEO. So some of her ideas will be far-fetched for those struggling in lower-level jobs. She writes with such conviction, however, that she'll carry even skeptical readers along with her, and she offers genuine help by giving people the words to understand and describe what they are going through as they close and open chapters of their lives. (Nov.)

Forecast:Carpenter is well known in the media and Internet worlds, which will bring interest for her name alone. The current surge in books on how to deal with change (e.g., Who Moved My Cheese?) will draw readers who are unfamiliar with Carpenter, as will the blurb by Deepak Chopra on the book's cover.

Corrections: There has been a title change for a book reviewed in the Oct. 29 issue. The book was reviewed as Bang! You're Dead (Wiley) but is now titled Through Different Eyes.

In our review of The Unfinished Election of 2000 (Forecasts, Oct. 29), one of the contributors' names was incorrect. His name is Alexander Keyssar.