Find Your Whistle: Simple Gifts Touch Hearts and Change Lives

In this entertaining book, Ullman, a director at the Carlyle Group equity firm and a four-time national and international whistling champion, explains how his childhood fondness for—and remarkable skill at—whistling became “a journey that went from “peripheral to my life to the core of my existence.” As he describes his teenage years in the 1970s, whistling as he delivered newspapers by bicycle, and his decision to begin competing in 1993 at the National Whistlers Convention, Ullman explains his whistle “is a tool, a means to touch people’s hearts and lives in simple ways that deliver joy and goodwill.” He provides many examples (in one anecdote, an ailing relative is given a burst of energy after Ullman whistles for him), as well as short profiles of various people who have used their own special skills to help others, such as Kelly Burkart, a web consultant who makes her own Christmas cards. Ullman’s uplifting message is that everyone has a special gift or “whistle” and that it’s up to each of us to “find, develop, and share our whistles, not keep them undiscovered or bottled up.” (June)