A skillfully written and emotionally engaging account of buying and selling houses.
A veteran real estate agent shares stories and lessons from her career.
In this professional memoir, Sheehan, the author of Wang Kuo-Wei: An Intellectual Biography(1986), recounts tales from her years in residential real estate—her second profession, following an academic career focused on Chinese history. The stories in this book range from the mundane to the absurd to the heartwarming, and Sheehan uses them to explain her overall philosophy of real estate success and also to counsel readers who may be considering the purchase or sale of a house themselves. The book explores the challenge of being both a salesperson and a therapist for some clients, the difficulties involved in bringing all parties together for an agreement, and the satisfaction of developing one’s knowledge and skills over the course of many years. The clients in these stories, who are fully anonymized, represent a wide variety of personalities, motivations, and financial situations. Her fellow realtors are variously portrayed as allies, opponents, or merely marking time until retirement, and Sheehan makes it clear that she has little patience for those who don’t share her sense of ethics and professional responsibility. But although some of the tales here focus on bad behavior, the book never takes a salacious or gossipy tone, and Sheehan's evident sympathy for her clients—even when their indecisiveness and capriciousness cost her time and money—turns even the most outrageous accounts into object lessons.
Sheehan is a proficient storyteller, and she turns her tales of last-minute negotiations, questionable septic systems, and stubbornly overpriced fixer-uppers into high drama: “I had never seen fungus on an interior wall before,” she notes at one point, “much less redfungus.” The book is informative as well as entertaining, and readers will come away with solid knowledge about home inspections and contingencies, purchase and sale agreements, and the intricacies of setting a correct price when a property enters the market. Buying or selling a home is as much an emotional transaction as a financial one, and Sheehan gives full weight to the significance of the process for all parties involved. She also displays a soft spot for the houses themselves, arguing that a buyer or seller may be wrong about a place’s worth, but the house itself is never at fault. The author’s repeated references to the prestigiousness of various properties can be grating; one, for instance, is described as being “on Crestview Lane, one of my sales region’s most desirable addresses,” and several others are noted as being “upscale” or “luxury” homes. However, these descriptors can also be taken as evidence of Sheehan’s clear pride in her work. The book’s tone also tends toward the extravagant (“Aside from a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, is there anything more beautiful than this?”), but it generally avoids melodrama and makes for a fast-paced and enjoyable read. Overall, she manages to turn even the most difficult parts of the real estate process into good stories.
A skillfully written and emotionally engaging account of buying and selling houses.Pub Date: May 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64704-329-2
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Canterbury Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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