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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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