Helpful, practical advice—although newcomers might be put off by more advanced material.
Sales consultant Kedar provides a step-by-step blueprint for building meaningful and effective digital communities in an increasingly noisy and disconnected online world.
In this business book, the author argues that great online communities—whether they’re on social networks, such as Facebook, or cloud-based tech platforms, such as Nas.io—aren’t about member counts, algorithms, or technological bells and whistles; they’re about having a sense of purpose, an atmosphere of trust, and a feeling of belonging. Drawing on her own experiences and interviews with notable community leaders, Kedar provides nine core chapters that aim to guide readers from the earliest visioning stages to the process of scaling and sustaining thriving groups. The book begins by exploring the psychological foundation of community—that is, why people crave belonging, and how a shared purpose forms a basis for engagement. She then covers foundational topics, such as clarifying your community’s purpose (or “North Star”), establishing values and rituals, and choosing the right technology platform. Other chapters offer advice on leadership strategies, designing experiences that invite participation, tackling monetization strategies, measuring impact, and navigating the challenges of growth. The text is supplemented by worksheets, templates, and reflection prompts, making it highly interactive. Kedar also includes useful comparisons of platforms Circle, Discourse, Mighty Networks, and Skool. Ultimately, the book positions itself as a practical, user-friendly companion for those who want to build spaces that foster genuine human connection. There’s a lot of value in Kedar’s approach, as she makes a strong case for purpose-driven, inclusive communities and offers a structure that newcomers to the field will find especially helpful. Her emphasis on empathy and psychological safety sets a meaningful tone, especially in an era in which many online spaces are more transactional than transformational. However, although it provides a wide range of exercises and reflective questions, some sections rely more heavily on theory or motivational language than on practical insights (for example, discussions about platform selection and monetization are relatively high level). Still, the book does offer a solid foundation that may appeal to solo creators.
Helpful, practical advice—although newcomers might be put off by more advanced material.Pub Date: April 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781965971116
Page Count: 260
Publisher: GWN Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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