The National Academy of Professional Book Editors has selected Caroline Romano to create a book review on How to Be White. She is Associate Editor for Aperture Magazine and has written for several other magazines. This is the third book she has written and it is a very interesting read in that Romano looks at both the advantages and disadvantages of being Caucasian, and her arguments about how to overcome some of those disadvantages. She also talks about how ethnicity affects your work in the professional world.
One of the biggest problems that I see with people, whether they are dealing with their nationalities or their races, is that they cannot keep a balance between their two lives. When you are working and taking care of your family as well as maintaining a professional career, you can’t neglect either. You certainly can’t neglect being taller than the people that are around you, no matter what your racial identity may be. Romano does a good job of pointing out the difficulties that people who are shorter than them have in the business world and in the profession in general.
It would seem that Romano’s main thesis in this book is that if you are trying to be successful in the business world, you have to have the confidence that being tall will help you succeed. Of course, with any height boost, whether it be mental or physical, you still need to have the self-confidence and motivation to make it work. However, I do believe that being tall can be an advantage in that it can add a certain sort of ‘cool’ factor to you. In fact, I hope that being tall and American will work wonders for all of the readers of How to Be White.