Here, former Wall Street Journal reporter Larson, incensed and victimized, exposes the network of consumer espionage that places ordinary citizens at risk of losing their constitutional right to privacy by merely purchasing something—even this book—or by refusing to purchase what researchers, from their lists and profiles, believe they should. Using the census, a variety of public records such aa birth or real-estate notices, hidden cameras, and live observers ("spymasters"), market researchers can and do uncover intimate details about the lives of consumers (their eating habits, sexual preferences, personal hygiene) for the purpose of shaping the way products are marketed and to whom—but rarely to improve goods and services. Larson traces how subtle, sophisticated, and easily abused this information-gathering is, highlighted by the psychologists and archaeologists, employed by advertising agencies, who sift through household trash, and by the anthropologists whose study of masculinity concluded that modern men require a new set of symbols to rescue them from their sexual confusion—a set of symbols to be provided by an advertising campaign. An insightful historical survey of marketing techniques from "mass" marketing to "target" marketing-used to identify specific segments of the market and to manipulate their behavior—shows the evolution of consumer espionage aa a "science," complete with its own jargon (e.g., "post decision dissonance," which means realizing you have bought a lousy car). Personal, indignant, clever: Larson offers strong ammunition against an enemy so insidious that most people don't even know it's there.
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1992
ISBN: 0140233032
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Here's another entry in the list of books about big, bad businesses. In this, the once credulous author takes a wrong turn on Wall Street, lands on a frenetic Merrill Lynch trading floor, and runs into a cabal of wheeler-dealers he calls a Latin Mafia. After a year, there's the inevitable exit interview. It's a story of job dissatisfaction in the extreme. With Harvard and the Navy on his rÇsumÇ, Stiles, of the Free State of Maryland, sought his fortune in the heady world of finance. That meant the capital of capitalism, New York. For him, specifically, it meant Merrill's emerging-markets group dealing in esoteric Third World debt instruments, and he had no notion of what they were. The world of high finance is one of young autodidacts. Rational training is rare; education depends on a skeptical attitude and a little reconnaissance. The reader can learn, along with the author, what a Brady bond is and how leverage on derivatives squeezed Orange County, Calif. Those with little interest in such arcana will nevertheless find entertainment in the cautionary tale of a young man's discovery of the hubris and naked mendacity emblematic of the warriors of Wall Street. Added to the cultural misfit at work, life in the Big Apple (Brooklyn, to be exact) was a disaster for Stiles, his loyal spouse, and his little dog, too. The big bucks didn't go very far and the Stileses were, in a funny set piece, manhandled in small claims court. Ultimately, though, it was a question of morals. Was the possibility of a seven-figure take-home worth all the compromises? In somewhat overwrought terms, the author, like a Boomer Hamlet, wrestled with the question. The answer came easily. He was fired. Stiles's view of the marketplace is fundamentally true, of course. Nicely written latter-day muckraking in a slick and entertaining debut.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8129-2789-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
Strahan's prose, over-salted with adverbs, bromides, and sweeping generalizations, is well suited to dishing an...
A real-life Confederacy of Dunces records the "dysfunctional corporate family'' history of a New Orleans institution, Lucky Dogs, Inc.
The company's hotdog-shaped vending carts are a French Quarter fixture; its motley crew of transient wienie vendors were the apparent inspiration for John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prizewinning farce. Strahan, a Lucky Dog vendor and manager intermittently since 1968, is the straight man among the clowns. He's a self-described "conservative redneck'' whose disapproval of gay lifestyles and unenviable position of authority over a constantly changing and largely unmanageable army of Ignatius J. Reillys lends his account of Big Easy street life (especially portions dealing with the quarter's randy days during the '60s and '70s) an air of censoriousness. The Lucky Dogs crew—restless drifters, Vietnam vets, drunks, small-time swindlers, transvestites, carnies, and the occasional college kid—suffer misadventures more pathetic than madcap. Strahan mediates their disputes with loan sharks, pimps, irate landlords, and jealous lovers with wearied aplomb, and his accounts of these confrontations are largely tributes to his own judiciousness and wisdom. He's obviously a man of character (more than once he rehires employees who previously skipped town with the day's receipts) and a heads-up businessman: When a four-star restaurant banishes a cart for stealing too many customers, Strahan asks for the request in writing, then threatens to run it as an ad in the local paper. He guides the company's expansion into New Orleans's casinos and overseas, eventually landing a spot at that haven of American street cuisine, Euro-Disney.
Strahan's prose, over-salted with adverbs, bromides, and sweeping generalizations, is well suited to dishing an entrepreneurial success story. But as an interpretive, first-person history of New Orleans's funky street life, Managing Ignatius can't cut the mustard.Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8071-2241-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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