Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life (MGMT & LEADERSHIP) - Softcover

Eugene Okelly, .

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071499938 ISBN 13: 9780071499934

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education, 2007

Synopsis

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Chasing Daylight is the honest, touching, and ultimately inspirational memoir of former KPMG CEO Eugene O'Kelley, completed in the three-and-a-half months between his diagnosis with brain cancer and his death in September 2005. Its haunting yet extraordinarily hopeful voice reminds us to embrace the fragile, fleeting moments of our lives-the brief time we have with our family, our friends, and even ourselves. This paperback edition features a new foreword by his wife, Corinne O'Kelley and a readers' group guide and questions.

“Voicing universal truths . . . shared . . . simply and clearly.”-Janet Malin, New York Times

“Words to live by.”-Kerry Hannon, USA Today

“One of the most unexpected and touching books you're likely to read this year.”-Edward Nawotka, Bloomberg News

“An honest, thought-provoking memoir . . . O'Kelly has many lessons to teach us on how to live.”-Steve Powers, Houston Chronicle

“[A] well-written and moving book.”-TheEconomist.com

About this title

Review:

As CEO at accounting giant KPMG, Eugene O'Kelly was so immersed in his job that over the course of a decade, he managed to have lunch with his wife on weekdays just twice. His travel schedule was set 18 months out. Once, he was so obsessed with impressing a potential client that he tracked down the man's travel schedule, booked the seat next to him on a flight, schmoozed the guy all the way to Australia, landed the account, and flew immediately back to Manhattan. His Type-A ways vanished when, at age 53, a top neurosurgeon in New York told him he had late- stage brain cancer. "His eyes told me I would die soon. It was late spring. I had seen my last autumn in New York." [p.7] There are no TV-movie-style miracle treatments or extensions of his life expectancy; he's told he has maybe 3 months, and he doesn't spend any energy hoping for a cure. True to his CEO style, he creates goals for himself, lists of friends to visit for the last time; he meditates; he tries to create as many "Perfect Moments" that he can, during dinner or phone conversations with friends, and realized how few rare those moments of connection and joy were in his "previous life."[p116] "Chasing Daylight" is as much a self-criticism of his job-before- family ways as it is a meditation on time and a transition to a tranquil, spiritual state utterly foreign to him as a CEO. O'Kelly's absolutely more fulfilled by the soul work that he finishes in 100 days, compared to his 30 years of corporate promotions and accolades, and he utterly convinces readers to ponder their own situation, whether "in the gloaming" of life as he was or not

Review:

A calm, moving account of one persons preparations for death. This little
book makes an enormous and enormously positive impact
-- Accounting and Business, May, 2006

A moving memoir
-- The Times, March 14, 2006

Highly recommended for its priceless lessons about how to live -- getAbstract, September 2006

About this edition

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0071499938
• ISBN 13: 9780071499934
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224