Wall Street Journal reporter Swasy was, she tell us, spied upon, followed, and bugged while writing this admirable—if ultimately somewhat disappointing—history of the dark side of Ivory-soap and Tide manufacturer Proctor & Gamble. According to hundreds of interviews Swasy conducted with current and former P&G managers, contractors, and company watchdogs, P&G—a founder of the national brand name and a pillar of Cincinnati civic life since 1837—turns out to be a paranoid corporate strongman obsessed with controlling the lives of its employees and preserving the sacrosanct reputation of its brands. In chapters devoted, respectively, to the single-minded career of CEO Ed Artzt, to racism and sexism at headquarters, to totalitarian demands for worker loyalty, to hushed-up environmental debacles in P&G plants around the nation, and, finally, to the ruthless marketing here and abroad of brands—including Crest, Pampers, Tide, and, most notoriously, Rely tampons (which were responsible for a number of deaths in the toxic-shock syndrome scandal of the 1970's), Swasy thoroughly dismantles P&G's wholesome image. The documentation of various kinds of corporate malfeasance—including the well-publicized but still shocking episode in which P&G persuaded friendly local county law-enforcement officials secretly to search the private phone records of hundreds of P&G employees, looking for calls to Swasy's Pittsburgh phone after an unfavorable story by her appeared in The Wall Street Journal—is heroic. But the cumulative tale isn't shapely enough to stand on its own as a cautionary story, and Swasy is too close to it to ask what it tells us about corporate America today. For all Swasy's careful work, the book finally has a little ring of an author's rant. Must reading, however, for company watchers, P&G shareholders, curious consumers, and citizens of Cincinnati. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-8129-2060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
Gridiron fans of all stripes will find this a fascinating exercise in the collision of money, entertainment, politics, and...
Scathing, action-packed account of the rise and fall of spring football in the 1980s, with a familiar villain to the piece.
In 1961, writes Pearlman (Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre, 2016, etc.), a New Orleans–based art dealer and entrepreneur named David Dixon wondered why it was that the National Football League was so resistant to expanding outside of its existing franchises. His solution: to build a league for play in the “vast sports wasteland” of spring in those years before March Madness. Five years later, the United States Football League was born, though it would take another decade and a half before anything substantial came of it. The newborn league had rules meant to level the field among rich and poor teams, including caps on salaries and limits on how they were distributed among star players and workhorses. Said one team owner at the time, “we had a gentleman’s agreement,” adding, “of course, that’s only OK as long as you have gentlemen agreeing.” Enter Donald Trump, owner of the New Jersey franchise, who immediately began breaking those agreements and demanding that other owners subsidize him even as he revealed the depths of his ignorance about the game. Trump also began to press for the USFL to play not in spring but in fall, going up against the NFL and prompting speculation that he was really after an NFL franchise to call his own. In the end, the USFL collapsed—though, as Pearlman notes, it lives on in unexpected ways, including Trump’s arrival in the White House. “Thirty-three years after insisting his fellow owners would pay for Doug Flutie,” writes the author, “he was insisting Mexico would pay for a border wall.” If nothing else, Pearlman’s fluently told story provides context for why the sitting president holds the NFL in such contempt—and why the sentiment should be richly returned.
Gridiron fans of all stripes will find this a fascinating exercise in the collision of money, entertainment, politics, and ego.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-45438-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
A grimly amusing, occasionally off-putting first novel set in an eating disorders clinic. At nearly five eleven and 92 pounds, 25-year-old Alice Forrester, is the thinnest of all the anorexics in the upscale eating disorders clinic of Seaview Hospital, near Boston, where she's been admitted following a near-fatal heart attack. For a woman like Alice, who views her resistance to food as a spiritual achievementa Gnostic differentiation between desire and needthis new evidence of her own self-control is intensely satisfying, and she eyes the bulimics, fitness addicts, and obese women on her floor with far more disgust than pity. Still, a girl can only survive the clinic's monotonous routine of group therapy, individual therapy, art therapy, and family therapy with friends; her uneasy alliances with Gwen, a delicate trust-fund victim whose anorexia is actually causing her bones to crumble, and Louise, a food addict, prompt Alice to examine the origins of her own asceticism in her chilly relations with her successful, narcissistic parents and in her first love, a black homosexual who introduced her to sex with disastrous results. Fortunately, Alice's morose musings are soon interrupted by a new arrival: Maeve Sullivan, a slutty, voluptuous bulimic whose desire to consume everything, including and especially life itself, horrifies yet fascinates self-denying Alice. Maeve's casual trysts, her wolfing down of sugary deserts and then nonchalantly vomiting into whatever trash can is available, and her surprising habit of baring her large breasts for Alice's admiration are just what this frightened girl needs. Alice surrenders herself utterly to Maeve, who naturally soon abandons her, but not without leaving our love- starved young heroine with just enough hunger for life to carry on. An intriguing view of the world through an anorexic's eyesand no fault of the author's if that view is often an unpleasant one. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-75518-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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