Occasionally entertaining but bloated business success story written from the cheering section.
The origin story of beauty brand Glossier and its enterprising founder.
Journalist Meltzer, author of This Is Big and Girl Power, charts Emily Weiss’ trajectory to industry mogul. The daughter of a shipping-company executive and a stay-at-home mom in upscale suburban Connecticut, Weiss was mature, entrepreneurial, and obsessed with fashion from a young age. In high school, she showed up for an internship at Ralph Lauren in clothes she made herself. This proactive attitude led to a stint at Teen Vogue, but even a cameo on MTV’s The Hills failed to distract her from her goal of a career in fashion “with longevity.” Her style blog Into the Gloss debuted in late 2010. With the help of a venture capitalist, Weiss used the blog as a launching pad for an e-commerce site featuring a few base products for the Glossier line. The line’s social media “voice” became an amalgam of the specific marketing and advertising qualities Weiss wanted to spotlight. After weathering the initial product-line tweaks, she focused on promotion and strategy. Building her customer base, she ushered the luxury beauty “unicorn” to massive success with a clothing line in 2019. Weiss stepped down as CEO in 2022. Meltzer paints her subject as a shrewd, determined entrepreneur and a professional who’s unwilling to discuss the details of her personal life, then or now. The tone of the book is energetic but overly gushing, spotlighting Weiss’ career with a devotee’s applauding admiration. Meltzer regards their ongoing relationship as “warmly professional,” but the text is often overly fawning, taking on the tone of a book-length infomercial. Recounting a meeting with Weiss, the author writes, “Her confidence was striking. She seemed to always know what to say.” Meltzer’s subject is certainly intriguing, but many readers may wish for a more evenhanded approach.
Occasionally entertaining but bloated business success story written from the cheering section.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982190606
Page Count: 288
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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