While Goad's defense (and overview) of redneck culture past and present is sure to infuriate the liberal reader, he is also...
An often reactionary diatribe on reverse discrimination by the editor of the 'zine Answer Me!, redeemed in large part by its author's phenomenal sense of humor.
Goad disavows both the political right and left, but he's most likely to be tagged as a conservative. He's most lucid when characterizing the centuries-old race struggle in our country as a smokescreen for what should really be a class struggle. The poor have been enslaved, persecuted, and exploited by the upper class regardless of skin color, Goad maintains. That words like "redneck'' and "white trash'' are deemed acceptable while the "N-word'' is not is proof that as Americans, by and large, we have been duped by rich folks into playing the race card. The author is at his best when using humor to elucidate a point, as when he argues that both black slaves and some disenfranchised whites were cheated and lied to by society in the same manner. Ex-slaves were offered 40 acres and a mule (which they never saw); whites in 18th-century America who had been bonded servants (in effect, white slaves) were promised "two suits, an ax, and two hoes.'' The hoes, "we are to presume, were gardening tools instead of prostitutes, unless `weeding' and `grubbing' were sexual euphemisms in colonial America.'' Goad's astute command of history and his sharp wit make for a volatile combination, and one that could be misread. A truly bigoted reader may take Goad's remarks about Lincoln not really intending to free the slaves, or about there being other Holocausts besides the Jewish one, out of context and use them to buttress their racism or anti-Semitism—views that Goad clearly does not sympathize with. But, of course, ideas that have value are also often dangerous.
While Goad's defense (and overview) of redneck culture past and present is sure to infuriate the liberal reader, he is also likely to make that same reader laugh ruefully, and often.Pub Date: May 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83113-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
For Gorman, creating customers is an act of cultivating delight–-a motto that most businesses would do well to follow.
Gorman, who runs a boutique creative-brand agency, offers a refreshing return to business basics, when competition was a novel concept and businesses actually put the customer first.
Not that Gorman is trotting out old business saws in a fuddy-duddy way; his style is energetic, and his delivery is keen and clean. He is not about to forsake branding, but he will tell you to forget the fancy dancing, the retro music and the airy cleverness. His emphasis is on delivering satisfaction to the customers—consistently–-with the ultimate goal of making them friends for the long term. Granted, it's not a revolutionary concept, but in the Age of Hype, it's certainly salubrious. Profits cannot be a guiding principle; business owners must understand the values, tastes and preferences of their audience, and then create a brand that becomes "the story that people will tell when asked to recommend your product or service to someone else"–-and one that exceeds expectations. In other words, create an identity and be all you say you are. Tag lines, logos, websites–-these are all brand articulations, and though Gorman acknowledges their importance, they are not value articulations and they can't carry the product if the consumer's experience isn't pleasurable and enthusiastic. Gorman even goes a step further: The product must be a delight. (He includes many amusing anecdotes, but the best involves him tipping a saxophone-playing spaceman in the subway.) Gorman also offers intelligent advice about making oneself attractive to prospects, about clarity of message, about elegance and about the importance of word-of-mouth for verifying quality (with a nod to George Silverman)–-though it would have been helpful to get a few examples of controlling and sequencing word-of-mouth marketing.
For Gorman, creating customers is an act of cultivating delight–-a motto that most businesses would do well to follow.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-9749169-0-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An accessible audit of Russia's efforts to gain a place at global capitalism's table after more than seven decades of Communist misrule and mismanagement. As Goldman (Economics/Wellesley; What Went Wrong with Perestroika, 1991, etc.) makes abundantly clear, switching from a centrally planned economy to a market economy is easier said than done. Goldman draws on in-country contacts, official records, and contemporary news reports to document how Moscow has gone wrong at critical junctures since 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev first set the Soviet Union on a restructuring course whose implications he did not fully grasp. After a lucid account of the sociopolitical events that allowed Boris Yeltsin to oust Gorbachev (in effect, by undermining the USSR), the author offers an unsparing critique of the current incumbent's stewardship. Like his unfortunate predecessor, Goldman points out, Yeltsin failed to facilitate the formation of new businesses. Nor did he and his chief adviser (Yegor Gaidar) do enough to encourage land ownership. They also neglected to institute currency reforms that could have dampened inflationary pressures and enhanced the ruble's convertibility. Banking, price control, and tax policies were botched as well; the regime has dithered disastrously on privatizing state-owned enterprises; and the government has yet to sponsor commercial codes that might restore much-needed order to a chaotic, crime-ridden consumer marketplace. The author goes on to weigh Russia's makeover prospects in the context of the bootstrap recoveries achieved by former Kremlin satellites (Hungary, Poland), mainland China, and WW II's losers (Japan, West Germany). Even without much foreign aid or investment in the short run, concludes Goldman, the Russians could eventually win their latest revolution, albeit at no small cost. An informed and informative analysis of the toil and trouble attendant upon a great nation's attempts to gain world-class status as an economic rather than military power. Helpful tabular material and graphs throughout.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03700-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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