An engrossing but uneven account about a health care mission.
In this memoir, a man recounts his extraordinary success as a serial entrepreneur and his attempts to provide affordable health care.
Golinkin contends that passion is a necessary component of leadership. He didn’t discover his life’s true passion—to make health care more accessible and affordable—until after he graduated from Harvard in 1974. While working for Reeves Communications, a producer of television shows, he became intoxicated with the idea of creating health-related programming and started his own company, American Medical Communications, in order to bring his dream to life. In the early ’90s, with the Mayo Clinic as his partner, he launched America’s Health Network, a cable enterprise devoted to wellness and medical issues, which he sold to Fox in 1998. In search of a new challenge and motivated to change a stagnant health care industry, he started RediClinic, an urgent care provider housed in stores such as Rite Aid, Walgreens, and Walmart. The obstacles to success he faced were extraordinary—stiff competition, a difficult business model with high fixed costs, a lumbering economy, and astonishingly prohibitive regulatory restrictions, all lucidly explained by the author, who writes in unfailingly clear prose. Over 35 years, he would serve as the CEO of six companies, including FastMed, another urgent care provider, and would accomplish the seemingly impossible—make a genuine difference in a massive, impossibly complicated, and slow-shifting industry. Golinkin’s accomplishments are quite impressive, and he limns a uniquely edifying view of the health care industry. He’s not a doctor or a “health policy wonk,” but rather a self-professed “capitalist” looking to make key improvements while amassing money. But he recounts the financial histories of his ventures in minute detail, a tendency that will eventually tax the attention of many readers. In addition, the lessons he draws are conventional—leaders should be passionate, maintain a work-life balance, and “find good people and help them grow.” His reflections on the inadequacies of the U.S. health care industry are far more intellectually rigorous; for example, he suggests that costs could be restrained if providers were guaranteed reimbursement for services rendered via “video, digital, telephonic, and even some forms of print communication,” an innovative recommendation. Still, readers will wish the author spent more time ruminating on these vital issues rather than the financial aspects of his businesses.
An engrossing but uneven account about a health care mission.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781955884549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: ForbesBooks
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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