A small business owner shares her fears, failures, and successes in this motivational memoir.
It turns out there are plenty of “F words” that apply to owning a business: Each of the 21 chapters, plus an introduction and close, is titled with one. Building a book around “F words” might have felt somewhat artificial in the hands of a less capable writer than Preslar (On Heaven’s Couch, 2011). Her “French parents brought me into this world as an F word—Fabienne,” one justification for the manual’s amusing title. The author writes with such style, verve, and flair that it is hard not to embrace the concept and follow her journey. While the volume covers the typical ups and downs of small business ownership, one of its more striking elements is Preslar’s authenticity in unveiling her vulnerabilities. She willingly shares the difficult lessons she has learned in life and business, focusing on the realities of facing her fears and rising above failures. For example, the author reveals that fear has, at times, been debilitating, but she has made positive efforts to overcome it. She writes that fear is “like a flame that burns brighter when it’s fanned with avoidance, antianxiety medication, and denial.” Preslar also discusses how, as an introvert, networking and business relationships have not been easy for her, especially when she was unexpectedly “stung” by someone. The author tells a particularly poignant story about one experience with a woman from whom she learned three valuable lessons: “We never know what someone is thinking….We tote our baggage everywhere….We never know what someone is going through.” Such personal insights and refreshing candor lend a richness to the book and move it beyond just another entrepreneur’s account of building a business. Preslar offers helpful counsel to anyone contemplating business ownership, weaving in advice about finances, health, leadership style, interactions with employees, and more. The short chapters are always followed by several thought-provoking questions for readers to consider.
Written with a great deal of humility; highly reflective, heartfelt guidance for entrepreneurs.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943070-39-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: SPARK Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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