David Oates – författare

Living in Paris for a winter and a spring and waking each morning to a view of Notre Dame, David Oates is led to revise his life story from one of trudging and occasional woe into one punctuated by nourishing and sometimes unsettling brilliance. In The Mountains of Paris, he offers a technique of reimagining one's life story that might be available to anyone.The present tense of the book takes place during the seasons he spends in Paris, sharing an artist';s residency. It is a rare opportunity to consider what it means to be human, through time-stopping moments with music, art, and deep history. The past tense of the book offers memories that intrude into the bustle of Paris life: a Billy Graham crusade at age thirteen, a mountain pass, a love, a loss.In long years of mountaineering Oates fought the self-loathing which had infused him as the gay kid in the Baptist pew. In The Mountains of Paris, he ascends to a place of wonder through intense, personal narrative encounter with the strangeness of being alive. In his searching, luminous, and inimitable prose, Oates invites readers to share the sense of awe awakened by a Vermeer painting, or the night sky, or the echoing strains of music fading down a Paris street, lifting the curtain on a cosmos filled with a terrifying yet beautiful rightness.

The turbulent changes in corporate culture mean that upwardly mobile managers need more than ever to carve out their own career paths. They must take charge of their personal developement and training needs, because they are unlikely to spend more than a few years in any one company. They have to create, their own continuity of career progression, rather than relying on corporate HR Departments to chart the course for them. This book sets out many developments adversely impacting on career progression - including corporate structural change, cultural change, outsourcing, use of management consultants etc- and then deals with the practical steps that companies and career minded managers are taking to counteract them.