Conversational, easy to consume and well-packaged, with an infectious passion for selling that makes for an enjoyable,...
A top salesman shares his success strategies in this compact, nicely crafted volume.
Milstein (17 Cents & a Dream, 2013, etc.) is a leading loan officer and CEO of Gold Star Mortgage Financial Group, a national mortgage lending company. He attributes much of his success to his sales ability, and in this breezy book, he lays out his formula for achieving superstar-salesperson status. The book is clearly designed with the busy salesperson in mind; it has short chapters, plenty of bulleted points and clever cartoon illustrations to break up the text. The work is also liberally dosed with “Sales Pro Tips.” For some readers, these snippets of helpful advice may prove to be most valuable. “If no formal measurement for sales success exists for your industry, create your own,” writes Milstein in one tip called “Build Your Yardstick.” In another, he advises a bold idea: “[B]e a proactive mystery shopper by contacting the competition directly. You can ask them how they are different.” The sidebar “25+2 Ways to Enhance Your Sales Performance” could well become an experienced salesperson’s cheat sheet for how to rise above the rest. The tips themselves are probably reason enough for any salesperson, experienced or not, to add Street Smart Selling to a must-read list. The text is no less inviting, although weaving sales-war stories together with how-to advice isn’t new. Once in a while, readers may get the feeling Milstein is shilling for his company. He writes, for instance, about Gold Star’s hiring and training program and, later, about its methods for making new customers feel welcome. Still, the potentially self-congratulatory examples aren’t without their relevance. Given the overabundance of books on selling, it is exceedingly difficult to say something new; while Milstein’s effort does not entirely break through the morass, salespeople will likely appreciate the authentic battle-tested advice offered by such a skilled professional.
Conversational, easy to consume and well-packaged, with an infectious passion for selling that makes for an enjoyable, uplifting read.Pub Date: July 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0983552772
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Gold Star Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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