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IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME

HOW TO TURN BEING UNDERESTIMATED INTO YOUR GREATEST ADVANTAGE

Inspiring reading for budding entrepreneurs.

A celebrated gay venture capitalist offers advice about "how diversity could be our greatest superpower."

In 2018, Hamilton became "the first “Black female noncelebrity to grace the front cover of Fast Company magazine." Before that, she was a live music production coordinator fascinated by the alien world of venture capitalism. In her debut, the author provides a guide for anyone not in "the straight white male population" to “do the thing they’re passionate about." Drawing on her experiences in both music and business, she emphasizes the need to gather information in all ways possible: not just by consuming print and online information, but also by connecting with people in one’s chosen area of interest. For “underestimated people," in particular, gathering together a diverse collective of individuals and not buying into the myth of the self-made person is key to success. “I am made up of my brother, my wife, my friends,” and every member of her company, Backstage Capital. Hamilton also highlights the need to “amplify the voices of those without a microphone," especially in cases where an individual has gained enough power and influence to be heard. One of very few African Americans who seek to create a funding pool for startups headed by other minorities, Hamilton at first received many rejections from the (white male) business establishment she courted. She tells readers to expect the same but to also cultivate both an extra measure of self-confidence as well as forgiveness, which she calls “the ultimate productivity hack." Resilience—part of a person’s “adaptability quotient"—fosters the ability to move forward. At the same time, Hamilton urges fighting against the business establishment’s proliferation of "hustle porn" by trading in “hustle for self-care." Refreshing in its inclusivity, Hamilton’s book offers wise and practical lessons from the margins to all “underestimated people” looking to make a difference in the world of business and beyond.

Inspiring reading for budding entrepreneurs.

Pub Date: May 5, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-13641-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Currency

Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

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POEMS & PRAYERS

It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.

A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”

McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.

It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025

ISBN: 9781984862105

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025

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WHO KNEW

MY STORY

Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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