An often inspiring memoir of a PR agency founder.
Finn tells of what he learned after separating himself from his family’s public relations business and founding a new PR company.
When the author started New York City–based FINN Partners in 2011, he began with 150 employees; the company eventually grew to employ 1,300 people, with offices all over the world, including such corporate clients as Jack Daniel’s and Walgreens. The PR firm worked in partnership with the Catskill Mountain Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by Finn and his wife in 1998 that’s dedicated to supporting the arts in southeastern New York state. He traces the development of these two organizations, noting, for instance, how the Covid-19 pandemic brought out the best in CMF: “We immediately went into crisis mode, focused on the safety of our employees, our artists, and our audiences.” It’s a story of personalities and often serendipitous meetings, as when, in 2016, an unexpected phone call from Hong Kong’s Ying Communications resulted in FINN Partners establishing a tech-focused agency in a region that the author had long sought to move into. His for-profit company grew mainly by acquisition, with his long-term vision enabling it to post a tenfold profit in a little over a decade. He underscores the moral elements that undergirded the growth of his companies from their inception: “Taking care of our people and our clients,” he writes, “was more important than anything else.” The narrative provides equal focus on both the nonprofit and for-profit sides of Finn’s career.
The author occasionally lapses into truisms, such as “every acquisition comes with some risk” or “listen closely to your inner self,” and he sometimes seems to overestimate potential reader interest in details of the monthly and even daily doings of his two organizations. A congratulatory thread also runs through the book, with dozens of the author’s friends and relatives weighing in to offer praise, including employees stating, “I think Peter teaches you when you don’t even know you’re being taught” and “Peter leads by example and lives and breathes our values”; as the author writes at one point, “How did seemingly mild-mannered Peter Finn make a success of such ambitious ventures as the Catskill Mountain Foundation and FINN Partners?” But the book’s overriding message of championing the practice of companies acting in alignment with the best values of their people is genuinely restorative, as when Finn urges readers, including other businesspeople and entrepreneurs, to “make sure you are doing something that is meaningful and important to you and to the world you live in.” Finn’s account of the personal risk he took in leaving the family business is winningly heartfelt; readers contemplating similar moves will find much encouragement and abundant valuable practical advice: “If you dream of launching and building an organization—whether for-profit or not-for-profit—you may or may not have a substantial source of funds to start with,” he notes. “Sometimes there’s no option but to launch on a shoestring.”
An often inspiring memoir of a PR agency founder.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781953943651
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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