A readable and convincing case for re-establishing work-life boundaries.
Roe sounds a call for entrepreneurs to turn off their perpetual availability.
In her nonfiction debut, the author, a CPA and management efficiency expert, starts her examination of our current always-on work culture by describing how she was once a part of it. “I could not keep living this way,” Roe writes of the times in her life when she was glued to her cellphone. “I knew that I needed to make some big changes, but it would be worth it.” Her book lays out a blueprint for such big changes, propelled by a simple question that will prove bracing for many of her readers: “Can you honestly say that you only work nine to five, Monday through Friday?” Per the author, the current trend toward work overload, in many ways accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, is particularly acute for entrepreneurs, who already tend to feel like they should be working all the time (Roe has been in this position: “I was very conservative,” she writes, echoing a sentiment many entrepreneurs have felt, “and couldn’t justify putting up the cost for something I could do myself”). In a series of chapters that includes scenes from the author’s own business and family life, the author repeatedly reminds her readers of why they became entrepreneurs in the first place: “Was it to have more flexibility? Was it to be more available for your family?” she asks before challenging, “Do you feel more stressed now than before?” At every turn, Roe comes across on the page as an experienced and compassionate corporate coach. The author insightfully touches on many aspects of running a business, from meeting deadlines to hiring employees, and fleshes out every discussion with examples from her own working experience, such as the time she lost a client by sticking to her own availability schedule. Some of this will sound like heresy to those entrenched in the current work-obsessed/always-available business world, but Roe’s book should make plenty of converts.
A readable and convincing case for re-establishing work-life boundaries.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798992367805
Page Count: 170
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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