An engaging, well-documented business book that should become a valuable resource for urban farmers everywhere. In a...
The co-founder of “the world’s first commercial rooftop farm” chronicles how she and a small group of socially conscious and creatively resourceful individuals built their successful business.
In this lively and graciously written account, Plakias, a founding partner and vice president of Brooklyn Grange, relates the numerous painstaking efforts (and pitfalls) made at each step in the development of this unique business currently operating across 2 1/2 acres on two buildings in Brooklyn and Queens. The author begins with how the concept and principles were established through the shared commitment of a core group of diversely talented yet like-minded staffers back in 2008. She then tracks the arduous process of scouting for ideal locations and the grueling experiences building and maintaining each farm. Throughout, the stories are colorful yet instructive. Intending for Brooklyn Grange to be a community-minded business that could be both agriculturally and fiscally sustainable, Plakias is careful to stress how continuing research and a shrewd use of data, as well as their agility in diversifying channels of business, were crucial to their eventual success: “It was a combination of community-minded enterprise and straight-up necessity that brought us to where we are today, with distinct but interwoven divisions of our business,” she writes. “The community gives us clear direction about what they would like to see us doing, and by listening to them—by reading every email that comes in, by talking to our customers and the chefs to whom we sell—we understand the markets available to us.”
An engaging, well-documented business book that should become a valuable resource for urban farmers everywhere. In a category glutted with titles on digital startup operations, the thoughtfully detailed planning and advice laid out here will be inspiring to a wide range of small brick-and-mortar business entrepreneurs.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59240-948-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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