An engaging, nuts-and-bolts breakdown of the financial side of entrepreneurship.
A detailed guide to disentangling three key elements of business.
In his latest, business consultant Duryee (Lead To Succeed, 2005, etc.) describes a familiar triangle: business owners, who believe that if their revenue and profits are healthy, banks should be willing to lend them money; bankers, who worry that business owners “may not understand the difference between profits and cash flow, and therefore will overly rely on debt to support growth”; and luckless certified public accountants caught in the middle, trying to get both sides to speak the same “language.” In this book, Duryee promises to resolve this age-old problem, providing prospective business owners with clear and easy-to-follow explanations of financial statements and how to apply them to business models, how to understand cash flow (which isn’t the same as profits, he points out), and how to develop forecast models for financial statements. He writes with clarity and authority even when he’s deep in the weeds of financial arcana: “Always use straight-line depreciation on your internally produced financial statements because accelerated depreciation artificially lowers both the value of your assets and your profit.” He correctly notes that many entrepreneurs start their businesses with passion and vision but precious little financial acumen. Overall, this book takes key concepts—everything from liquidity to accounts receivable—and skillfully renders their essentials. Although he may overestimate how quickly novices will be able to master such information, he makes it all immensely relatable by linking his ideas to lessons he’s learned in his own career as a consultant. Along the way, he offers case studies, bullet-pointed lists, and graphs to make sure that nothing is left to chance. Newcomers to the business world will consider this book a godsend, but even old hands will likely learn something from it.
An engaging, nuts-and-bolts breakdown of the financial side of entrepreneurship.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-946978-17-2
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Best Seller Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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