An informative and business-savvy proposal for small-scale, attentive elder care.
Small residential care homes are good for the elderly and for the bottom lines of investors, according to this insightful business study.
Some, a real estate broker and owner of residential care homes in the Seattle area, touts the residential care home model—featuring ordinary suburban houses with six to ten residents and round-the-clock professional staffing—as a more humane approach to elder care than large, institutionalized assisted living facilities and nursing homes. When done right, she argues, residential homes have a comfortable, familylike atmosphere and a high staff-to-resident ratio that permits individualized care for residents. Employees, she notes, can make home-cooked meals to residents’ specifications, served when they want them instead of at rigidly planned meal times; help residents practice their preferred hobbies and activities instead of relegating them to once-a-week bingo games; accompany residents to medical appointments; and spend time chatting and forging meaningful relationships. The author contends that her model of high-quality care makes for happier residents who are less prone to depression; in turn, residential care homes can charge higher rents with higher profits. Some’s primer often reads like a business plan, replete with hard-headed financial reasoning. (“Two vacancies would be a $14,000 shortage every month. Could you afford to keep a place running with that much of an income drop?…That’s why I have focused on avoiding those empty beds. By keeping employees motivated and well compensated, the home succeeds as a business.”) But she also pays attention to the softer side of elder care, writing of the wrenching psychological dislocations many elderly people endure in sensitive, nuanced prose: “When I was working at an assisted-living facility and a new resident would arrive, I would greet them and try to get to know them a little bit. One of the first things they would ask me would be ‘Does this mean I am never going back to my home? Will I be dying soon?’” Some’s expertise and passion for elder care makes her pitch all the more persuasive.
An informative and business-savvy proposal for small-scale, attentive elder care.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9798990282605
Page Count: 186
Publisher: NS Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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