Hustling for a Buck

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Greber uses the framework of fiction and a small cast of fictional
characters to present material on how to start and successfully run a
business. This imitation-novel approach is artificial, tedious, and
makes for painful reading. The style fails in its attempt to make the
factual material interesting and meaningful by presenting it in a
dramatized context. The characteristics of poorly written fiction are so
strong that they overwhelm the practical how-to information the work is
intended to convey. Even if one does enjoy reading about the fictional
businesses, run by fictional people, the framework makes the work
useless as a reference or resource book.

The book contains information on setting a goal for a new business,
writing a business plan, the impact of technology on business,
marketing, taxes, and other issues of interest to the entrepreneur. The
challenge to the reader, should he or she choose to accept it, is to
find this information. Every time I tried to look up what the work has
to say on these topics I ended up in a morass of artificial dialogue
that sounds like the leftovers from a B-grade soap opera.

There are lots of good books available on starting a business in Canada
in the 1990s. This isn’t one of them.