Solid business writing that will interest budding moguls.
The Forbes senior editor of media and entertainment takes a look at modern show business–based entrepreneurship.
Hollywood has always had its business-minded celebrities: Think of Fess Parker, who bought up vast swaths of Southern California real estate, or Roy Rogers, who built a restaurant chain in his name. The new breed, writes Greenburg, is likelier to invest in intangibles and speculative tech-based ventures. One to whom he pays particular attention is Ashton Kutcher, who built a considerable fortune playing film characters such as, fittingly enough, Steve Jobs and starring in one of the most popular series on TV, earning him the highest salary in the business. With a partner, Kutcher founded an investment fund worth $30 million in 2010 that soon grew to more than $250 million. The author credits him with doing his own homework and following an investment philosophy: “look for companies solving a real problem…and consider unglamorous sectors.” It’s a philosophy that other celebrities, from Shaquille O’Neal to Jennifer Lopez and a small army of hip-hop stars, have taken to following. Examples include investment in a Los Angeles–based “company that makes companies,” software that rounds up purchases and invests the change in index funds, and a “Fitbit for cows” that tracks a bovine critter’s reproductive health and other issues. Having celebrity spokespeople and investors helps, but the companies Greenburg profiles are absolutely on track in solving real problems, even if they are sometimes real problems that most of us don’t have—e.g., how to snag a seat on a charter jet in the same way an earthbound traveler summons a rideshare driver. Though at heart his book is an extended magazine article, there’s plenty of interest here, especially when the author looks at inventive philanthropy such as Matt Damon’s Water.org, which brings plumbing to poor communities but also works “to create venture funds that generate low single-digit returns by giving cheap microloans.”
Solid business writing that will interest budding moguls.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-48508-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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