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SELLING THE DREAM

THE BILLION-DOLLAR INDUSTRY BANKRUPTING AMERICANS

Eye-opening reporting on a prolific scam.

Chronicling the rocky road to the so-called American dream.

Peabody and Emmy Award–winning journalist and podcast producer Marie offers a biting exposé of multilevel marketing schemes (MLMs), triangular business structures that exploit people hoping to realize riches and success. MLMs, the author asserts, trade on the quintessentially American idea “that anything can be achieved through a combination of optimism and willpower.” If people don’t strike it rich through an MLM, they’re criticized for not working hard enough, not having the talent to sell, or not wanting it enough. For individuals who feel disenfranchised, lonely, or isolated; for those discouraged with their jobs; and for some lured by lifestyles of the rich and famous, MLMs promise not only wealth “but also freedom, community, and status. They’re promising autonomy and empowerment and the realization all of your dreams.” Marie offers zippy, shrewd profiles of MLM founders and sensitive histories of individuals caught in their web to show how—and why—these businesses persist. Such companies may market sex toys (Pure Romance), cosmetics (Mary Kay), household products (Amway), health supplements (Herbalife), or athleisure (LuLaRoe). “In an MLM,” writes the author, “the product being sold doesn’t matter”; the “key architects” make money from recruitment fees and sellers’ purchases of their own inventory. To make money, sellers must recruit other sellers, who need to amass their own inventories, aiming to sell to—or recruit—friends, neighbors, family, and co-workers. In Marie’s interviews, sellers confessed to losing thousands of dollars; besides inventory, they shelled out for company-sponsored seminars and motivational materials. Yet, the author notes, despite being confronted with lawsuits by federal and state agencies, MLMs continue to prey on desperate people who want to believe in a meritocracy, where “all you need is grit and charm to reap its rewards.”

Eye-opening reporting on a prolific scam.

Pub Date: March 12, 2024

ISBN: 9781982155773

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

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Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

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