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Wednesday, 21 May 2008 |
Succession: A Story of Corporate PastReviewed By Stuart Nachbar
 Succession
Succession has a shorter timeframe than the author’s career, but it is based on the same idea. Jake Garrison, an aspiring Civil War fiction novelist has a pregnant wife and sick father and he must return to a career of handling undercover due diligence for investors who want to purchase businesses.
The business in Succession is a large, struggling typewriter manufacturer that has been merged into an even larger corporate conglomerate, as was the practice during the 1960’s when the novel takes place. The company, Kensington has been in a losing battle on price, sales practices and technology; IBM has fast become a dominant player in the business-to-business with the Selectric and it is feared that they will enter the consumer market as well under their label or someone else’s. Some Kensington executives want that someone else to be Kensington, though Garrison’s client is not one of them.
To make matters worse, Garrison’s client has supposedly impregnated his wife. However, needing money, he follows a lesson he has lived by his whole life: show no pain. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 21 May 2008 )
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Wednesday, 30 April 2008 |
Virtual Book Review Network interview with Lindsey Pollak, author of Getting From College to Career
How do you get a job without experience and get experience without a job? It's the question virtually every college student or recent graduate faces. In Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to Do Before You Join the Real World, Lindsey Pollak offers the first definitive guide to building the experience, skills, and confidence grads need before they start their first major job search.
 Getting from College to Career
LAUREN SMITH: What inspired you to write Getting From College to Career – your own experiences, the experiences of others, or a little of both?
Lindsey Pollak:
Getting From College to Career is the book I wish I’d had when I was in college. It’s the book I wish my younger brother and sister had. It’s a collection of all of the tips, ideas, advice, secrets, strategies and warnings that I didn’t even know I didn’t know.
It has also launched a dream career for me—working as an author and speaker helping college students and young professionals. My senior year of college I was a freshman counselor (resident advisor), living with and advising a group of freshman students. To this day it was my favorite job I’ve ever had—and this book provided the opportunity to continue this work. As a counselor I learned that helping students build confidence and a sense of themselves is just as important as teaching them specific skills. That’s the attitude I brought to writing Getting From College to Career—compassion for this very challenging and scary time of life, and a desire to help each student/reader find his or her own path and not fixate on what a recent graduate “should” do. I think of the book’s readers as extensions of the freshmen I counseled in college. My goal was to be a big sister to the reader—young enough to relate to their time of life and old enough to have some wisdom and perspective to share.
LAUREN SMITH: Do you think today’s college graduates face bigger challenges than ever before; if so why and what are those challenges?
Lindsey Pollak:
In many ways, yes. Demographically, there are simply more young people today, who are more educated and who more aware of available opportunities and global competition because of the Internet. Millennials are building careers in a time of tremendous competition, but also unprecedented global opportunity. I think it’s incredibly exciting!
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 30 April 2008 )
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Saturday, 26 April 2008 |
Review By Stuart Nachbar
I used to be an urban planner and I worked in and followed big-city politics in New Jersey. I’m one of those people who watched eight seasons of The Sopranos and told friends that there were some scenes that were not too far from real life in urban North Jersey.
 Landmark Status
Rolnick’s main character, Benji Bluestone, is the type of lawyer I might have become had I gone to law school instead of becoming a planner. He’s reasonably sane, knows his work and loves sporty cars, but he’s not interested in the big money or the big deals. Benji is the son of a lawyer who founded the leading real estate law firm in Miami. He prefers to be his own man, but wants his father’s respect.
Benji’s the most believable character in Landmark, but Delia Torres, who becomes his love interest, is less credible. Maybe it’s me, coming from Jersey, but a Princeton grad returning to Miami to become an exercise instructor, then later a real estate broker, seemed too far flung. It would have better to characterize her as a former Florida Gator cheerleader with a 4.0. It would have also been more consistent with the story. Miami fans hate the Gators and it would better explain how Delia could kick “admirers” in the cojones and walk away with a smile. But I’ll drop a hint about the ending: it’s Delia who conceives the brilliant business solution to save the day. |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 26 April 2008 )
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Thursday, 03 April 2008 |
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Friday, 01 February 2008 |
An Interview with author Erik Quisling...another great interview brought to you by the Virtual Book Review Network  Fables from the Mud Erik Quisling: I initially came up with the idea for Fables from the Mud shortly after I graduated college. In the course of my soul searching and trying to figure out my place in the world, I was struck with the idea of a clam who was trying to do the exact same thing. For some reason it struck me as extremely amusing. This is how The Angry Clam, the first fable in my book, was born. Lauren Smith: Do you see Fables From the Mud as a satire, cultural commentary or something more? Erik Quisling: Fables From The Mud is about three little creatures – a clam, an ant, and a worm – all of whom are struggling with very human problems. The stories are satirical but in many ways are simply a cultural commentary on the human obsession with finding meaning in the world. All in all, they are designed to be amusing and to get you to see somewhat the absurdity of taking life too seriously. Lauren Smith: How did you develop each of the fables? Erik Quisling: Each fable was born from its own separate bout of inspiration. In each case, it was a single line of text that came to me that was like lighting a fuse that set the story on its course. Once the fuse was lit, the stories pretty much wrote themselves – I simply had to go back and edit them a little bit. Lauren Smith: Are any of the characters based on anyone – or any type of person - you know? Erik Quisling: I can say that the more I read the stories, the more I learn about myself. But I truly think each character is a reflection of some deeply common human experience – not of any human in particular. |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 14 April 2008 )
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