Worth digesting, whether the reader relies on it for self-help purposes or merely for nonfiction entertainment.
An unusual hybrid work of self-help, business and narrative nonfiction.
Former Washington Post reporter Murphy (In a Time of War: The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point’s Class of 2002, 2008) admits to his failed attempts to start businesses, but his fascination with entrepreneurship led him to learn more by researching this book. The author focuses on three students who graduated from Harvard Business School in the late ’90s. The chapters alternate between the corporate start-up sagas of Marla Malcolm Beck, Marc Cenedella and Chris Michel on one hand, and each of the ten rules mentioned in the book’s subtitle on the other. Murphy’s explication of the rules is detailed and clear, although at times painfully obvious to the point of cliché. The journalism behind the author’s entrepreneurial profiles is strong, however, and the narrative chapters are compelling even though none of the featured businesspeople is famous, and their businesses, some of which they later sold, are known more to niche consumers than to a widespread audience. The degree of cooperation Murphy received from his subjects—as well as their classmates, professors, business partners and employees—is astounding, and greatly enriches the book. Most of the HBS classmates of the three leading characters did not follow the entrepreneurial path, causing the author to wonder about the specific qualities that made Beck, Cenedella and Michel stand out from the pack. Murphy digs deep into the minds and documents of the three protagonists to delineate the lessons they learned as they launched and nurtured their companies. The author then translates the lessons into a didactic context for readers who want to start enterprises based on HBS teachings.
Worth digesting, whether the reader relies on it for self-help purposes or merely for nonfiction entertainment.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9166-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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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