A readable, sobering study of entrepreneurial brilliance laid low.
A somber rags-to-riches, genius-to-madness story.
Tony Hsieh (1973-2020), the founder of Zappos, was a born capitalist, making $200 per month in middle school with a machine that made pin-on badges. A natural introvert, he was committed to overcoming isolation and prejudice, emerging before his Harvard classmates as “a young man who was full of adventure and curiosity and was destined for greater things.” Some classmates stayed with him as he launched his first tech firm, a complicated brokerage for internet advertising that was successful enough that he was able to sell it to Microsoft for $265 million. He might have walked away and spent the rest of his life enjoying the wealth. However, as Wall Street Journal reporter Au-Yeung and Forbes investigative reporter Jeans write, Hsieh wanted to do something more, sinking most of his fortune into an endeavor based on the premise that, given the opportunity and the option of easy returns, customers would buy shoes online without trying them on for size. That led to Zappos, “first a customer service-oriented company, a shoe seller second—an ethos its new values set in stone.” After Amazon came calling, buying the company for $1.2 billion in 2009, Hsieh spun off into an effort to remake downtown Las Vegas into a business incubator while falling into a cycle of drug and alcohol abuse, shedding old friends and surrounding himself with people who were content to watch his self-destruction as long as they got a piece of the action. Said Hsieh to one old friend who tried to caution him, “If you don’t question me again, I’ll give you half my net worth.” The story has an inevitably tragic end, though the authors offset the self-doomed, mentally ill Hsieh’s downward spiral with his generosity and well-intentioned efforts to do well by doing good.
A readable, sobering study of entrepreneurial brilliance laid low.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781250829092
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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