An information-packed glimpse into one executive’s journey to an EMBA.
A manager who aced an Executive MBA program delivers a debut workbook to steer others through the arduous process of earning this advanced degree.
This volume seeks to serve a growing need in today’s economy, in which individuals who want to earn an MBA degree can’t always afford to leave behind their full-time jobs—and paychecks—to go back to school. More people are choosing an Executive MBA program, offered by universities that allow part-time and even remote study toward an MBA. Clark’s ambitious manual aims to give students a primer on the skills they’ll need to succeed in a typical EMBA class. The author also presents his business credentials: he has 30 years of experience as a manager and executive in the computer technology industry for “real estate companies, financial institutions, entertainment organizations, glass companies, and telecommunications entities.” His book’s first chapter, “How to Participate in Online Classes,” makes clear how attending a virtual class is different from taking an in-person one—a lesson that folks who haven’t been in school for a few years will likely need. From there, Clark advises readers on how to communicate effectively, write typical business analyses, and collaborate on group projects. The most valuable advice appears in Chapter 2, in which he explains how to structure paragraphs for academic writing. He references the “PIE” method (point, illustration, and explanation) to show students how to build an informative paragraph sentence by sentence. While a typical workbook would stop there, the guide goes on to include actual copies of the author’s completed school assignments from his own EMBA. Clark even lists the grades he received, despite the fact that his knowledge comes across authoritatively throughout the book. Since the author reproduces his class assignments verbatim, those sections tend to be long and distracting, undermining the good example he’s trying to set by providing them. In fact, more than half of the volume’s pages are copies of his assignments. He admits up front that they contain syntactical and grammatical errors, but readers will likely find it difficult to ignore mistakes in the text. While Clark’s business acumen shines brightly, some readers may wonder whether this manual will apply to all EMBA programs.
An information-packed glimpse into one executive’s journey to an EMBA.Pub Date: April 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5455-0898-5
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2017
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
BOOK REVIEW
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