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FUNDaMentals

A well-written, useful guide that should enhance a CEO’s ability to communicate with the investment community and attract...

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Sage advice on engaging with investment professionals from a corporate communications pro.

In business, there are certain practicable formulas designed to maximize success in a variety of areas, such as financial analysis, business process management and marketing, to name a few. With the publication of Griesel’s book, add to the list a formula for getting investors interested in a company. Griesel’s well-delivered counsel is universally applicable to CEOs of larger public and private companies and owners of smaller companies. The author discusses certain basics—how to create an elevator pitch, how to make a presentation, how to create a business plan—that the reader could find in numerous other business books. But it’s her concentration on the more advanced fundamentals that make this resource valuable. Griesel’s informative discussion of professional fund investors, for example, is insightful: “PIs do you a favor by listening to your company’s pitch,” writes Griesel. “It’s part of your job to satisfy the needs, wants and expectations of PIs, and whenever possible, to unearth their fears or resolve any complaints or reservations that might prevent them from investing in your company.” This kind of blunt talk is likely to keep in check a business owner who may get too caught up in his or her own ego. Her chapter on “The Importance of a Cohesive Management Team” is equally straightforward. It includes two exercises for executives (one is used with the permission of an investment firm) that demonstrate why senior managers must share common goals and purposes and be able to work together. Writes Griesel, “Lack of a unified vision in the corporate suite is a surefire way to obliterate investor interest.” Griesel includes the obligatory chapter about social media but does a nice job slanting it to investor relations. Respecting the senior manager’s time, Griesel writes economically and replaces the fluff with specific suggestions.

A well-written, useful guide that should enhance a CEO’s ability to communicate with the investment community and attract new investors.

Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2012

ISBN: 9781936705016

Page Count: 278

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013

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IN MY PLACE

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

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A LITTLE HISTORY OF POETRY

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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