Comprehensive and edifying: Understood by the Joes, essential to the pros.
Whereas previous editions of Abbott’s reference work concentrated on real estate as practiced in the United Kingdom and the United States, the latest version expands on its already ample scope to include material from several additional countries.
Although published only eight years after its previous incarnation, the Third Edition should prove useful even to those who don’t require new insights into the practice of real estate in such far-flung locales as Hong Kong or New Zealand. Abbott’s encyclopedia is nothing if not thorough; its definitions include everything from basic financial idioms to Latin legal jargon to seemingly innocuous everyday words that nonetheless have specific–and less familiar–meanings within the real-estate realm. The book leans heavily on a dry style that should strike a chord with anyone who has ever perused the fine print of a standard rental agreement, but never becomes so tedious that the reader is confounded by impenetrable legalese. While a good number of entries are brief and layman-friendly (like those found in family encyclopedias), many run on for pages, carrying numerous citations of case law from different countries and explaining what are often tortuous, centuries-old understandings of land-holding minutiae. This is by no means a bad thing, as these longer entries serve to illuminate many of the more frustrating and opaque aspects of real-estate law, some of which have been around in one form or another since the Magna Carta. While that document doesn’t get an entry itself, most derivations of ancient English common law are intensively deconstructed. Abbott also ensures that even the most complicated entries begin with a brief, relatively broad definition, and exhaustively cross-references for terms which may be unfamiliar to the novice. The text is supplemented by several appendices, including an indispensable chapter that illustrates financial formulae intrinsic to real estate, such as annuities and interest rates.
Comprehensive and edifying: Understood by the Joes, essential to the pros.Pub Date: June 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9668946-4-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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