A light, breezy record of one entrepreneur’s rise to fortune and the crazy ways of modern American business.
A gift-card entrepreneur recounts his rise, dispensing life lessons and business tips along the way.
Before he “revolutionized the gift card industry” Dinkin had a rough childhood growing up near Toronto, where anti-Semitic bullies tormented him. But, as he writes in this debut memoir, he’s thankful for the experience; his pent-up anger, he says, motivated him to try harder and eventually become a successful businessman. After he and his family moved to Coral Springs, Fla., he worked in unsatisfying sales jobs before forming his own company, SmartClixx, in the booming gift-card industry. Dinkin, like many successful entrepreneurs, offers plenty of advice, often emphatically (“Life Lesson #1: SOMETIMES YOU JUST NEED A LUCKY BREAK!”; “Life Lesson #14: EVERY IDEA STARTS WITH A SPARK”). Although the tips aren’t particularly profound, they do offer readers a dollop of common sense—a scarce commodity in this or any age. Dinkin also shares his insights into the sales game, describing tactics like the “Ben Franklin” close, in which the salesman stresses positives over negatives, and the “reduce to the ridiculous” close, in which a product’s cost is divided over time. This primer on the ins and outs of the gift-card business includes examples of his company’s successes and failures, but its humor sets it apart; at one point, for example, a confused elderly woman calls the author to complain, thinking she’s somehow entitled to free gift cards, and Dinkin also includes his amusing interactions with a wacky, deceitful CEO with a Napoleonic complex. It’s clear in these pages that Dinkin believes he’s fulfilled his goal of success; for example, when he and his second wife drive behind a BMW with a bumper sticker saying “Life Is Good,” they chime in together, “But better for us!”
A light, breezy record of one entrepreneur’s rise to fortune and the crazy ways of modern American business.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988775305
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Doodle Vision Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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