Maybe not for everyone, but Godin fans and hipster marketers will want to buy it just to see the guru of smooth in action.
An update of a wildly popular e-book from a media and marketing guru.
Godin has become a brand of his own partly for peddling the basic idea of this brief e-book, which is enhanced by beautiful, slick videos illustrating his key concepts. The “ideavirus” is a term coined back in 2000 by the compulsively term-coining Godin for something better known as a “meme.” The author offers numerous examples that have made his exemplars lots of money—or at least, lots of potential to make lots of money. Perhaps the most striking example is Hotmail, the original free e-mail service. The product was not so much the service as the idea that it was free. A more original Godin term, also discussed in the book, is “smoothness,” which describes the ease with which an idea can be spread. Hotmail’s creators put an unobtrusive one-line ad for the service with a link to join up in every e-mail their users sent. Very smooth, as Godin would say. The ultimate object of the author’s manifesto is to urge marketers off the conventional, expensive ad campaign and think of ways to get customers to market to each other. An interesting and relevant question: Are the Vook enhancements—those slick videos, hyperlinks and updating of the text—sufficiently super an enticement to make customers pay for what the author says is the most downloaded free e-book in history, one that is still available for free?
Maybe not for everyone, but Godin fans and hipster marketers will want to buy it just to see the guru of smooth in action.Pub Date: June 25, 2010
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Vook
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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