Loch by Paul Zindel

Loch by Paul Zindel

Love has been driven out of our workplaces. How do we get it back in?

We're in the middle of an epidemic of stress and anxiety. A global pandemic has wreaked havoc on our lives. Average life expectancy in the United States is down. At work, less than 16 percent of us are fully engaged. In many high-stress jobs, such as distribution centers, emergency room nursing, and teaching, incidences of PTSD are higher than for soldiers returning from war zones.

We're getting something terribly wrong. We've designed the love out of our workplaces, and our schools too, so that they fail utterly to provide for or capitalize on one of our most basic human needs: our need for love.

As Marcus Buckingham shows in this eye-opening, uplifting book, love is an energy, and like all forms of energy, it must flow. It demands expression—and that expression is work. Whether in our professional accomplishments, our relationships, or our response to all the many slings and arrows of life, we know that none of this work will be our best unless it is made with love. There's no learning without love, no innovation, no service, no sustainable growth. Love and work are inextricable.

Buckingham first starkly highlights the contours of our loveless work lives and explains how we got here. Next, he relates how we all develop best in response to other human beings. What does a great work relationship look like when the other person is cued to your loves? What does a great team look like when each member is primed to be a mirror, an amplifier, of the loves of another? Finally, he shows how you can weave love back into the world of work as a force for good, how you can use your daily life routines to pinpoint your specific loves, and how you can make this a discipline for the rest of your life.

Today, too often, love comes last at work, and we are living the painful consequences of this. Love + Work powerfully shows why love must come first—and how we can make this happen.

Paul Zindel, one of the founders of the young adult literary genre, is a writer with a great respect for memory. He has used his own reminiscences of youth, as well as his experience as a high school teacher, to create characters infused with the spirit and longing of adolescence. As he writes in his autobiography, The Pigman & Me

Eight hundred and fifty-three horrifying things had happened to me by the time I was a teenager. . . . If you haven't croaked before finishing this book, then you'd understand how I survived being a teenager.

It is Zindel's ability to write about teens with honesty and humor that has made him one of today's most renowned and beloved writers of books for young people. As New York Newsday recently remarked, Zindel is the rare specimen of a grown-up who seems to have total recall of that emotional roller-coaster ride.

Born in 1936 on Staten Island, New York, Paul Zindel was raised by a single working mother after his father deserted the family when Zindel was two years old. To find work, Zindel's mother moved the family fifteen times during his childhood and adolescence. As a result, Zindel didn't form many close friendships. He turned inward, becoming an adept observer of the world around him, a trait that would serve him well as a writer.

All of my novels begin with real, specific moments from my own life, says Zindel, and in fact, most of his novels deal with issues that mirror Zindel's experiences as a teen: a fatherless adolescence, a turbulent relationship with a mother, feelings of worthlessness, and the absence of long-term friendships.

In fact, everywhere you look in his work, you'll find reflections of his childhood and adolescence. The search for a father figure is seen in The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman. The exploration of a mother figure with low self-esteem is discussed in Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball! And of course, the concepts of mental and physical illness are powerfully dramatized--no doubt motivated by Zindel's 18-month convalescence from adolescent tuberculosis--with characters that populate books from The Pigman and The Pigman's Legacy to Harry and Hortense at Hormone High.

After graduating from Wagner College on Staten Island, Zindel spent ten years as a high school chemistry teacher before writing his Pulitzer prize-winning play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. He was encouraged by a well-known editor who had seen the play to write a novel for young people, and in 1968 The Pigman, the book which has since influenced millions of adolescent readers and their teachers, was published to wide acclaim.

Most critics of adolescent literature agree that the young adult genre originated in the late 1960s with the publication of several books, one of which was Zindel's The Pigman. Since writing this book, Paul Zindel has helped keep the YA movement flourishing with 12 other YA novels, along with plays, a children's book, a series of books for middle-grade readers, The Wacky Facts Lunch Bunch, and screenplays.

Paul Zindel is married and has two children, David and Lizabeth. And just as his own early life contributed to his novels, the lives of Paul Zindel's children and his wife shape what he thinks and writes about.

Writing! magazine said of Paul Zindel's books, Zindel's fiction is a dazzling juggling act--despair, hilarity, uncertainty, deep love, and unutterable hatred all fly toward and away from each other with increasingly disquieting speed. Only one thing is certain: You can never be sure where and how things will fall. The same could be said for Zindel's remarkable life.