Clearly and cogently written, a thought-provoking book that provides useful guidance to entrepreneurial risk takers as well...
This combination self-assessment and idea starter should spark the interest of anyone with entrepreneurial drive.
Debut author Sullivan, herself an entrepreneur and small-business trainer, enters a crowded category but sets her work apart with its good intentions. Rather than supply the how-to advice commonly found in most be-your-own-boss books, Sullivan explores the motivational aspects of pursuing the entrepreneurial dream while also providing a wealth of business ideas. In the book’s first section, Sullivan offers such entries as “10 traits for entrepreneurial success,” “six benefits and six drawbacks” of being your own boss, and “14 keys to ignite your enthusiasm and passion.” Part 2 digs into the details of where an entrepreneur’s passion may lie. Here, Sullivan walks the reader through “12 areas of opportunity,” including both general and specific conceptual ideas. For example, the first two chapters in this section make a useful distinction between focusing on selling to consumers versus selling to businesses, while another chapter addresses selling to governments. Other areas key in on current trends that suggest possible areas of business opportunity: e.g., food and family farms, pets and companion animals, assisting seniors and people with disabilities, and “promoting a sustainable future.” A chapter entitled “Serving Needs of the Global Population” puts forth the concept of “social entrepreneurship.” The book’s final section concerns the entrepreneur’s assessment of the viability of a chosen idea. Here, Sullivan lays out a process for idea evaluation, offers helpful advice about how to do market research to determine an idea’s value, and provides an alphabetical listing of “50 Steps to Starting Your Business.” She includes a helpful multipurpose spreadsheet that can be used to rate areas of interest and ends with an extensive resources section. Sullivan applies a refreshing amount of altruism to her choice of categories that should give would-be entrepreneurs a sense of purpose as they consider what direction to take.
Clearly and cogently written, a thought-provoking book that provides useful guidance to entrepreneurial risk takers as well as a treasure trove of potential business ideas.Pub Date: March 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9907542-0-6
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Synergy Books, LLC
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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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