An amusing, thoughtfully written manual regarding the complex, challenging enterprise of landlording, full of enthusiasm,...
A Boston landlord and mediation expert provides a guide for landlords who want to profit while exerting a positive influence on their communities.
Many books offer advice to landlords about how to manage rental properties. The most notable of these how-to volumes, Landlording by Leigh Robinson, now in its ninth edition, has sold more than 370,000 copies since it was published in 1975. Here, debut author Shapiro develops an entire, unique ethos that recasts the negative image of the evil, greedy landlord as an exceptionally positive role model involved in the community—helping tenants while retaining personal boundaries, providing good serviceable housing, and, of course, still making money. The author, like most other landlord authors, deals with the tortuous and sometimes-tenuous legal framework that owners and tenants use. He’s clearly thought long and hard about how enlightened, civic-minded self-interest can guide the wise landlord. The book is replete with many anecdotes that show Shapiro’s deep engagement in the business and ethics of landlording, drawing on sources as diverse as the 18th-century observer of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville, the mindfulness practitioner John Kabat-Zinn, and the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who developed the idea of the “needs hierarchy.” “Instead of treating a negotiation as a contest between enemies…try considering it as a problem to be jointly solved,” Shapiro counsels. Much of this engaging book offers powerful emotive strategies for dealing with difficult issues, but in simple, clear language, it emphasizes a central message: that making a profit as a landlord need not exclude ethics. Indeed, it asserts that proper landlording can be a fulfilling mode of providing service. The cartoons interspersed throughout the text offer little to support this important message, but overall, this book makes a significant and unique contribution that goes beyond standard landlord-tenant fare.
An amusing, thoughtfully written manual regarding the complex, challenging enterprise of landlording, full of enthusiasm, insight, and wisdom.Pub Date: April 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-44036-0
Page Count: 284
Publisher: The Good Landlord Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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