A concise, forceful, and entirely cleareyed program for getting the waste and disappointment out of the construction...
A pair of experts offer a guide for the management and funding of construction projects.
This collaborative work from the team of Levine and Burns (Capital Projects and Healthcare Reform, 2015) expands from a couple of starkly simple opening assertions. “News articles are full of stories of monumentally botched schedules and budgets,” the authors write. “Even projects that are said to be on time and on budget often have scope and content significantly reduced from the original concept in order to meet those schedules and budgets.” As they observe, despite the best efforts of experts and advisory panels, virtually every building project is still plagued with the likelihood that it will be late, over budget, or scaled back from its original design. Drawing on the authors’ long experience in the industry, their new book provides a series of straightforward and useful ideas to fix this endemic problem, a process of evaluating projects rooted in evidence-based design. The process has multiple components (Levine and Burns stress throughout their succinct manual that seemingly simple answers to any of these issues are almost always useless and can be damaging), sharing the main theme of increasing the knowledge of the owners engaged in the projects. As the authors deftly point out, those owners should recognize the need to educate themselves rather than complacently relying on others; they should build an understanding of “the nuances of the planning-design-construction industry”; and of course they should prioritize communication at all levels and stages, breaking down the “silos” that tend to form when multiple groups are involved in any complicated, long-term project. The authors have devoted their careers to enterprises involving health care, but, as they note, all projects share general concerns with cost, schedules, and scope. All owners will benefit from the concentrated experience and wisdom delivered in these pages. The specific construction details will change from project to project, but the clear common sense advocated here is universal.
A concise, forceful, and entirely cleareyed program for getting the waste and disappointment out of the construction business.Pub Date: July 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-527521-0
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
