A tough but worthy and detailed overview of the world that business freelancers face.
A debut guide targets entrepreneurs looking to strike out on their own and succeed in today’s economy.
Solopreneurs are business owners who run their enterprises “solo—as in, mostly by themselves,” writes Kluver. “They want to be accountable for themselves and their business without having employees or being an employee.” As the author points out, this is a rapidly growing segment of the working world: people fired up by dreams of success and facilitated by modern technology, which allows them to extend their reach far beyond the traditional and more local areas. Kluver, “an entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience,” cites a study that estimates that as much as 40% of the American workforce might be freelancers by 2020, as the gig economy continues to boom. The author’s aim in these pages is to give comprehensive guidelines and tips to readers who might want to join that freelancing crowd. He approaches his admittedly sprawling subject from many angles. There’s the psychological aspect, reminding his readers that they must avoid the “victim-based mentality” encouraged by much of modern society. (“You are always accountable to yourself,” he writes. “Nobody requires you to go to work.”) There’s also the practical level, with Kluver offering advice on subjects ranging from the pros and cons of investing in a business franchise to the variables of hiring a good attorney and finding an insurance agent who’s a good fit with the business. The author is refreshingly direct and honest throughout, indulging in none of the simple cheerleading so often found in books of this kind. When discussing what lies in store for hopeful solopreneurs when they inevitably deal with banks, for instance, Kluver warns them not to take it personally when institutions try to poke holes in their business models: “They aren’t trying to insinuate you will fail; they only want to know the probability of success, and you should as well.” There’s a wealth of insights in these pages: Aspiring freelancers of all kinds will find the book invaluable.
A tough but worthy and detailed overview of the world that business freelancers face.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1258-7
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Cherokee Street Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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