Practical inspiration for hardworking entrepreneurs.
His brand of vacuum cleaners became a trusted household name, and now Oreck sweeps onto the how-to scene with timeless, common-sense advice for business startups.
At 90 years old, Oreck still loves flying planes. He’s also excited by the new business ventures he has created since selling his successful vacuum company over a decade ago. That enthusiastic energy reverberates throughout his debut, which combines applicable recommendations for the novice with anecdotes of his own business experience, beginning with his first entry-level job in the RCA wholesale distributorship after World War II. Times may have changed since Oreck worked his way up to sales manager and then struck out on his own with the direct mail marketing of his vacuums, but he stresses that human nature remains constant. With an affable tone, he shares vital ingredients for his brand’s success, such as knowing—and literally visualizing—his target demographic for a lightweight vacuum cleaner (older, wealthier females), offering optimal customer service (a 21-year guarantee) and marketing to educate consumers about the benefits of his product. Black-and-white photos from Oreck’s life and sample advertisements are sprinkled throughout the lively narrative. One memorable ad shows a gray-haired hotel maid holding an Oreck vacuum above her head with one hand. During an era when lightweight products were thought to be less powerful—the competition even used this misconception against him—Oreck procured contracts with hotels, thus validating his vacuum’s strength and durability. As a self-made man who didn’t graduate from college, Oreck eschews business theory in favor of real-world practicality, and there’s no jargon in his easy-to-read book. “Knowledge is not talent and theory is not practice,” he says. In another key bit of advice, he suggests maintaining control of distributorship and avoiding the sale of products to large chains. While it may be tempting to place product with Wal-Mart, Oreck writes, the small business owner ultimately has little say when dealing with the giants. Though there is some intentional repetition of ideas, it doesn’t disrupt the book’s flow or its uplifting message. Readers who wax nostalgic for the days before faceless big-box stores will appreciate Oreck’s homespun adages and emphasis on customer service.
Practical inspiration for hardworking entrepreneurs.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1934606438
Page Count: 176
Publisher: TAG Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2014
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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