A breezy, bloodless take on a corporate story more colorfully recounted elsewhere.
An insider account of how and why a little cable company in Bristol, Connecticut, became “The Worldwide Leader in Sports.”
Hired in 1981 as ESPN employee No. 150, Bodenheimer started out delivering mail and driving on-air talent like Dick Vitale to the airport. By 1998, he was president of the company. Because his professional rise synchronizes almost perfectly with the astonishing growth of ESPN, this professional memoir serves not only as a management guide, but also as a broad-brush history of the company. From his early days as an account executive selling and marketing ESPN to affiliates in the Southwest (“…we’ll carry it because…this is a sports town”) to his last as the company’s executive chairman, Bodenheimer helped feed the country’s apparently bottomless appetite for sports, peddling the network’s unprecedented 24/7 blend of event programming, journalism, and entertainment. From identifying a market for televising the likes of the America’s Cup, the Indy Time Trials, the NFL Draft, and the World Series of Poker to packaging previously obscure sports like the X-Games to providing “punch-through” programming like the NFL on cable, ESPN got there first and, by staying true to its brand and mission, transformed itself into a multimedia, global behemoth. Although Bodenheimer confesses to a few of the company’s miscalculations and mildly criticizes exactly two people, this relentlessly upbeat account consists largely of bouquets tossed to those responsible for the programming milestones, mentors and fellow executives, and various on-air talents whose reports contain a powerful source of social currency and whose catchphrases have become part of the national vocabulary. With the help of Phillips, Bodenheimer scatters management advice throughout—about branding, setting priorities, handling people—that convinces, if only because of the company’s outstanding success.
A breezy, bloodless take on a corporate story more colorfully recounted elsewhere.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-8609-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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