An indispensable resource for project managers.
A manual describes how to detect and manage building projects hijacked by political agendas.
Based on their own considerable experience, the Osmans (Buildings, Projects, and Babies, 2017) have written a book specifically designed to help the managers of construction projects undermined by furtive political schemes. For example, an undertaking can be commandeered by a surreptitious plan to embezzle government resources for private gain or redirect them to fund illegal activity. The authors provide concrete guidance regarding how to spot such ulterior motives that can potentially destroy a project; for example, irrational anomalies in spending or hiring, an inexplicable indifference to quality, and a penchant for gratuitous delay on the part of the client might be signs of political skulduggery. The Osmans also counsel readers how to delicately manage such a predicament should it arise. The crux of their advice is that managers, whenever possible, should satisfy their project obligations and adapt to whatever challenges might be produced by clients’ unscrupulous intentions. The authors illustrate their lessons by fashioning fictionalized cases; for example, a massive project in Bolivia is hampered by a client’s late-in-the-game demand for a two-story penthouse, a request specifically aimed at slowing down development. The Osmans also persuasively argue that part of the problem is that project management is largely unregulated, bereft of the standard licensing requirements so common in other professions. They propose and describe a Federal Department of Project Investigation to devise and enforce standards and protect project managers from nefarious clients. The book is both clearly and cleverly written, crafted around an analogy between the primary players on a project and the team that delivers a baby (the project manager is the nurse and the father the client). The authors are veterans in the field, and their professional expertise is unquestionable. Unfortunately, an extended discussion of the superiority of border cities in the construction of border walls devolves into a thematically incongruent detour that should be the subject of its own monograph. Still, this remains a valuable reference guide.
An indispensable resource for project managers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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