Sincere and well-intentioned, if somewhat-formulaic, counsel on starting a business.
Advice for budding entrepreneurs about the fear of failure.
The message of this debut can be easily summed up in a phrase from its opening chapter: “fear and adversity are not your enemies.” They are worthwhile, legitimate concerns, particularly for those who are pondering starting a business; indeed, fear of failure can be paralyzing for many entrepreneurs. Pelletier, a principal at Pelletier Construction Management, draws from his own experience to show how one learns from setbacks, overcomes them, and perseveres throughout one’s career. He refers to a few other figures who found success after failure—such as Matthew Webb, the first person to successfully swim the English Channel—but the book is more about providing advice, rather than examples. The content seems overly familiar at times; for example, goal-setting is found in virtually every self-help book, and a chapter on the downside of “doing nothing” is elementary. A “road map to success” is quite basic as well. However, the book does offer a few memorable ideas, such as the author’s four-step “recipe for success”: accepting risk, experiencing fear, learning from failure, and then repeating the process. The book’s focus on the contrast between the “abundance mindset” and the “scarcity mindset” is also engaging; although it’s essentially another way of expressing the difference between optimism and pessimism, Pelletier offers a clear explanation and provides decent advice on how to change a scarcity mindset. A discussion of “enablers,” who reinforce failure instead of providing encouragement, is similarly worthwhile. Pelletier’s advice about personal financial discipline may be most useful to young entrepreneurs, as when he counsels the reader to “live below your means,” “trust your nest egg,” and “remain humble.” An accompanying reading list of seven books is helpful but could have been more robust.
Sincere and well-intentioned, if somewhat-formulaic, counsel on starting a business.Pub Date: May 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0330-1
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An engaging, if unchallenging, account of an author whose route into—and out of—literary celebrity makes him seem, for better and worse, a man of his time. From the first short stories Caldwell (190387) struggled to get into print, his works drew on the observations he made of poverty in the rural South and the lessons in social consciousness he received from his father, a preacher. Caldwell's first wife, Helen, and their children shared his life of grinding poverty while enduring his volatile temperament. He honed his craft, helped by Helen's editing, but even his best-known work, Tobacco Road, generated poor initial sales—in Miller's estimation because the publisher, Scribner's, marketed the sexually explicit book so timidly. When playwright Jack Kirkland turned Tobacco Road into ``the bawdiest Broadway hit in history,'' Caldwell gained a solid income and practice at arguing for artistic freedom as local officials across the nation tried to close down touring-company productions. As he adapted to a more luxurious life, he also found himself a more glamorous wife: photographer Margaret Bourke-White, with whom he collaborated on studies of southern sharecropping and of Russia during the German invasion—an arrangement that collapsed as Caldwell learned he came second to her art just as Helen and the children had come second to his. Miller (who has a Ph.D. in History of American Civilization from Harvard) tends to avoid probing such fissures in his subject's actions and writings, particularly during Caldwell's decline from celebrity, finally giving this account the feel of a life observed with only intermittent intensity. For example, when discussing Caldwell's mid-1950s output—stories for ``mediocre (often X-rated) journals'' and a ``melodramatic, mildly pornographic'' novel whose sales were enhanced by its spicy cover—he concludes without a trace of irony that Caldwell was ``earning a living from his craft.'' Miller reveals, but never really explores, the complexities and inconsistencies of a man who wrote both first-rate fiction and disposable prose.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42931-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
Filtering out the mythic anecdotes that have built up around Steinbeck, Parini (The Last Station, 1990, etc.) presents a straightforwardly readable portrait and assessment of one of the last practitioners of the Great American Novel. For one of the most popular American authors worldwide, Steinbeck seemed happier as an aimless young man, surviving off odd jobs, intermittently attending Stanford University, and harboring an intense conviction of his talent, than as a bestselling author, Broadway and Hollywood success, and Pulitzer and Nobel prize winner. Steinbeck's personal life was complicated by his intense need for reassurance and stimulation, at odds with a sometimes withdrawn, rigidly principled nature—a product, Parini suggests, of his loving but forceful mother and distant father. But his friendships with the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the eccentric marine biologist Ed Ricketts, actor Burgess Meredith (who starred in the film Of Mice and Men), and the editor Pascal Corvini were long and deep. Campbell and Ricketts had considerable influence on Steinbeck's larger vision: the latter, in his ``organismal'' approach to man's place in society and on earth, and the former, in his mythic sensibility (though their friendship was cut short by Campbell's affair with Steinbeck's first wife, Carol). Parini also gives Carol Steinbeck due credit for her editorial assistance to her difficult husband and her social activism. Parini underscores Steinbeck's passion for writing, whether journalism during WW II, travelogues of scientific expeditions and journeys across the US and USSR, or a translation of Malory. Rounding out this perceptive biography, Parini judiciously charts the paradoxes of Steinbeck's later years: his happier third marriage complicated by his uneasy relationship with his sons from his second; his progressive disillussionment with postwar America and his equivocal support of the Vietnam war; and the hostile critical reception of his Nobel Prize. Parini's persuasive and lucid biography creates a vivid diptych of a turbulent individual and a neglected paragon of American letters. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-1673-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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