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THIS IS IT

IF YOU’RE WAITING FOR A SIGN TO START YOUR BUSINESS

A thorough work that provides useful perspectives on entrepreneurship.

Awards & Accolades

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A father and son share their path to business ownership.

In this book, Glenn Edwards and his son Jordan provide a much-needed detour from the usual road-weary guides to self-employment. Combining elements of a memoir, a corporate biography, and business how-to, their work traces the Edwards family’s successful businesses from their inception: Chart Organization, a commercial real estate firm; and Mixology Clothing Company, which sells women’s attire. Mixology, founded a decade ago in New York City, has surpassed $10 million in annual sales, they note, but they make clear that they didn’t ride a bullet train to success; by their own admission, their stories also include half-million-dollar losses. Glenn Edwards (Coming into Your Own, 2017) and his debut co-author include lots of advice (“Learn from your mistakes. And, if you are smart, learn from other people’s mistakes, too”), and also provide lengthy, instructive interviews in Q&A format with colleagues (such as Mixology controller Eugene Parisi), business leaders, and even sports champions (such as mixed martial arts competitor Sensei Nardu Debra). Comprehensive lists of recommended reading make this a handy resource, as do the final appendices, which gather up the specific advice in each chapter as bullet points. At times, the book feels like one is eavesdropping on a business roundtable. Along the way, the authors quote an offbeat collection of figures; for instance, a quote from Socrates appears in the same chapter as one by real estate mogul and Shark Tank panelist Barbara Corcoran, who embraces the melding of best practices and attitude—voicing a theme that the authors agree with, but that doesn’t normally run through a business book: “The difference between successful people and others is how long they spend feeling sorry for themselves.”

A thorough work that provides useful perspectives on entrepreneurship.

Pub Date: June 7, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5445-1292-1

Page Count: 174

Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019

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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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