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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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