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
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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