An often engaging account of an eventful life, along with thoughtful meditations on being a female entrepreneur.
Howard tells her story of creating and managing a successful startup in Manhattan in this debut memoir.
The author grew up in Queens, New York, in the 1950s, at a time when, she asserts, it was commonly expected that a woman would simply get married in order to pay the bills. However, she came from a long line of innovators and strong women, and Howard explains in confident, contemplative prose how, from an early age, she bucked societal convention. As an adult, she began her own business connecting freelance graphic artists to clients. The memoir focuses mostly on her family history in the beginning—perhaps a little too far back, as it describes her memory of being born. However, it does an able job of weaving together her personal life and business experiences to explain how she crafted a career with little mentorship. After receiving a degree in graphic arts at Syracuse University and working two years at Grey Advertising, during which she became their first female art director, Howard traveled cross-country with friends before settling back in New York as a freelance graphic artist in 1967. Out of this was born the idea for her agency, Creative Freelancers, which started as a small, classified advertisement in the New York Times and, she says, became the first such agency to go online in 1997. Over the course of the book, Howard offers plenty of advice on such topics as transferable skills and dealing with such setbacks as a business partner’s leaving and joining the competition. These tips sometimes fade into the background against so much detail about the author’s family life, but the work does effectively interrogate the difficulties she had in trying to “have it all”: “Mixing motherhood with a career or entrepreneurship requires a very reliable support system along with a good business plan, skill training, adequate start-up customers or investment capital, focus on priorities—and luck.”
An often engaging account of an eventful life, along with thoughtful meditations on being a female entrepreneur.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73331-963-8
Page Count: 291
Publisher: Hammond Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2022
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: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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