A thoughtful book that could actually save employers some serious money.
Putting a positive spin on workers’ compensation.
Friedlander is president of Friedlander Group, a company that specializes in workers’ compensation. As such, he has a vested interest in getting companies to have a positive perception of this often-maligned form of insurance, which he says can be a “lightning rod” as well as a “political football.” Friedlander’s approach in this well-written, helpful book is to focus on what employers can do to minimize workers’ compensation claims in the first place. He believes that by creating a “culture of caring,” employers can effectively save money on workers’ compensation, because “that culture will maximize your productivity, efficiencies, and profits.” His basic premise is that employees and management who work collaboratively to eliminate unsafe acts and conditions will see claims go down and, as a result, profits will go up. On the surface, this seems almost simplistically obvious, but Friedlander supports his argument with an explanation of how “experience modification”—the manner in which an insurance company modifies an employer’s workers’ compensation premium by its claims experience— actually has a much greater impact on cost than the premium. Shopping around for low premiums, writes Friedlander, might save a company 10 to 20 percent, while “experience modifications range from up to a 40 percent discount to a 100 percent additional premium,” so the real cost to the employer is hidden in the claims filed by its employees. As a result, focusing on safety and employees’ well-being is the real way to manage workers’ compensation costs. This revelation alone makes the book valuable, along with several eye-opening interviews with workers’ compensation experts. Employers will gain insight into such key issues as claims and premium fraud, abuse of the system, loss control and reducing the cost of claims. Friedlander includes an “Appendix,” which is essentially a sales pitch for his company, and two of the interviews are with his own employees. Though self-serving, they don’t detract from the core content.
A thoughtful book that could actually save employers some serious money.Pub Date: May 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615442297
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Friedlander Group
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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