Louisiana Books

This is a valuable book (resource) for budding entrepreneurs. It seems to try to cover all the bases for starting a small business, but it can't do them all well in the space available between its covers. The book is only 288 pages long. If you are in the planning stages of starting a small business, then I highly recommend you get a copy of this book. Read it, study it, and outline it. There are helpful checklists to help you grasp the subjects. You will come up with a plethora of keywords and terms that you will want to google to find Web pages giving more detailed (and maybe more current) information.

I am a SCORE counselor (Senior Corps of Retired Executives) who typically does face-to-face counseling sessions three nights a month. It would really be neat if my clients would read this book BEFORE they came to their session with me because they would pretty much be "educated customers" ready to ask educated questions. Our sessions would be so much more beneficial.

My favorite chapters were:

1. Initial business concerns
2. Your business' structure
3. Business start-up details
5. Sources of business assistance (SCORE is mentioned here)
7. Your smart business plan (and a good sample plan is included)
8. Obtaining the financing you need

The book is weak when it comes to how the Internet can be used in corresponding, hiring, and marketing. But this is just one example of how googling keywords and concepts found in the book will make the book more complete. Don't treat the book as authoritative on the law. It isn't. Nor was it ever intended to be. It is light on tax information as it relates to small business.

I was particularly impressed with the material presented in Chapter 2: Choice of Legal Entity. That subject is sorely ignored in most small business books, and it is critically important. It is a subject I regularly must spend a great deal of time discussing at my SCORE sessions. This book does a pretty good job on the topic.

Chapters 4 and 9 through 12 are easy to find fault with. The topic of each could fill a book. But having these topics covered definitely will help a budding entrepreneur know some of the issues they raise.

I would have liked the book more if Chapter 6 (marketing) had been less superficial. When I read it I got the impression that the author was more a public relations expert than a marketing expert. I generally categorize public relations as a subset of marketing. Marketing includes advertising, public relations, and a whole host of other promotion techniques. I did not get this message when I read the book. I also would have liked the book better if the Internet, email, and Web sites had been discussed more. But there are many books on those subjects. Therefore, I can't complain too much about the limited discussion of computers.

When you read this book it may feel a little like it was produced on an assembly line. Maybe it was? There are 51 versions of this book sold; one for each state and the District of Columbia. Content is king, and this book has it. 5 stars!

Received my order in a very fast amount of time. It was in perfect condition.
Thanks

Well written and very easy reading. Although a fictional account, reading between the lines, one could find some truth in this story. What a story!

This is a wonderful story. A must read for a true and accurate account of what really happened to the forgotten heros of the storm.

This collection of essays provides a good slice of life for those who crave New Orleans.

Al Rose has provided a unique and important look into the lives and times of many of the most influential jazz men and women of the 20th century. His book, "I Remember Jazz" is a valuable historical glimpse at not only the musical influence these wonderful musicans had on the arts, but also a fascinating look at the social and economic conditions they endured.

This book should be required reading in every music program at the high school and college level. Some of the language is not appropriate for younger ages.

If an effort is not made to educate our young people about the history of jazz and its pioneers like Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, James P. Johnson, and the rest, this important part of our American history will be lost.

The book also includes many rare and fascinating photographs of the author with many of the musicians featured in his book.

Jazz is America's original artform and Al Rose has written a book that is required reading.

Margaret Gibson, a poet who has given us many books exploring the human experience, brings us in Icon and Evidence a passionately spiritual oratorio. The poems are among the most musical I have read in a good while, and their literary antecedents and allusions are beautifully woven into the whole.
The voice of Gerard Manley Hopkins echoes from many of these pieces, giving them an urgency too often lacking in much of our lackadaisical contemporary poetry. This is a book of poetry one can't put down, as if it weaves a spell, a spell approaching chant and liturgy.

Enhanced with an informed and informative essay by Michael Plante (Jessie J. Poesch Professorship in Art, Newcomb Art Department, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana) Ida Kohlmeyer: Systems Of Color showcases the prolific artistry of Ida Kohlmeyer, a lifelong resident of New Orleans who took up painting at the age of thirty-five and became an outstanding representative of both modernism and abstract expressionism in her work. Indeed, Ida Kohlmeyer achieved national recognition as a teacher, painter, and sculptor. In addition to presenting more than one hundred large color illustrations documenting the development of Kohlmeyer's artistic career, the reader is provided with a full chronology, a bibliography for further study, as well as a listing of exhibitions, collections, and commissions. Ida Kohlmeyer: Systems Of Color is a significant contribution to American 20th Century Art History Studies and should be a part of all academic library reference collections accordingly.

The seven essays collected in this book, written by Southerners between 1830 and 1860, are unpalatable pompous nonsense for any modern reader except perhaps a "stars-and-bars" Red State neo-confederate. All seven are self-righteous apologies for slavery, on the basis of the authors' interpretation of the Bible showing that the Negro is accursed and that slavery is God's Will. All seven make similar sociological arguments than slavery is a beneficent institution and a necessary component of a well-ordered society, in which some must always serve as the "mudsill." All seven accuse "fanatics," who ought to be tending to their own class of "wage-slaves," of campaigning to disrupt the idyllic social structure of the South, the new Athens. The authors in question are Thomas Roderick Dew, William Harper, Thornton Stringfellow, James Henry Hammond, Josiah Nott, Henry Hughes, and George Fitzhugh.

Historians as a profession sometimes need to comb through some awful trash to glean insights into the course of human events. Southern historian Drew Gilpin Faust (now serving time as President of Harvard University) has assembled and edited these essays, not only to hold them as exhibits of the intransigence with which the antebellum South defended its "peculiar institution," but also because she finds evidence in them of a larger cultural paradigm, of a world-view that depended on hierarchy and class consciousness for meaning, of a set of values based on white supremacy that didn't end with defeat in the rebellion of 1861-1865. She explains her hypothesis in a twenty-page introduction to the anthology.

She writes:

"In recent years... interpretations of proslavery thought have shifted. Perhaps more accustomed to the notion of a timeless and geographically extensive American racism, scholars have begun to place proslavery within a wider context, to regard it as more than simply a distasteful manifestation of collective paranoia gripping the South in the years before the Civil War. Historians have come to view the proslavery argument less as evidence of moral failure and more a a key to wider patterns of beliefs and values. The defense of human bondage...was perhaps more important as an effort to construct a coherent southern social philosophy than as a political weapon...
"The persistence of modern racism is but one forceful reminder of the ways human beings always view the world in terms of inherited systems of belief and explanation that only partially reflect the reality..."

Dispassionate language! Historians are rewarded for such. The dire corollary of Dr. Faust's hypothesis is that at least some segments of the American populace needed and still need "white superiority" to maintain the whole structure of their beliefs and values. If so, woe unto us!

This book is edited by Jane Officer and contains letters written by Andrew Lee Jones - the last man to die in Louisiana's electric chair. The book slowly reveals the character and thoughts of a young inmate waiting to die but hoping that his appeals will be successful. It is a one-sided correspondence because Jane Officer's letters to Andrew were lost around the time of his execution. However, we can easily deduce the nature of what she had written to Andrew from his comments on her letters.

One of the peculiar effects of the death penalty is to make those scheduled to die surprisingly articulate. Dr Johnson correctly observed that contemplation of one's death "composes a man's mind wonderfully". Despite his limited intelligence and rudimentary education, Andrew's letters to Jane set out the hopes and fears of a condemned man in a very direct and moving way.

They make an inlikely pair of correspondents - a widowed English grade school teacher and a poorly educated black boy from the bayou. Andrew's naive and dreamy view of England is sharp counterpoint to the harsh day-to-day reality of life on death row in Angola Prison.

As the end approaches, the reader would have to have a heart of stone not to find some compassion for Andrew as his hopes alternately are buoyed up only to be crushed as appeals are rejected and fresh execution dates set. This is a moving book and well worth reading for its inside view of what it is like to be warehoused for death.