A vigorous look at a bygone NYC club era—and the business lessons that can be learned from it.
Neman presents a combination of New York nightlife memoir and business playbook.
In his nonfiction debut, the author blends his recollections of experiencing the New York nightlife scene of the 1990s with the event marketing lessons he learned while living and working in that “unlikely ecosystem.” Neman went on to found the event marketing company JoonBug, and although these pages chart the founding and rise of that company, they also provide tantalizing glimpses of the wild world of 1990s club life, including some of the most exclusive establishments of the time, places like Bungalow 8, Socialista, PM, and Lot 61, which became famous for their spectacular events and the bizarre “Club Kids” who drifted from one hot spot to the next (“There was nowhere else you could find this kind of diversity, chaos, and creativity. It was as though society itself had been amplified and turned in a kaleidoscope”). Neman and his partner, Ariana, experienced this world firsthand (“both of us had lived and breathed nightlife for years”) and began to start seeing its limitations—such as its exclusivity, a business model that “isn’t built with long-term gains in mind but instead is driven by ego.” As JoonBug began to garner clients and industry recognition, Neman learned how the circuit worked and began coming up with innovative ways to update it. He’s a lively, energetic storyteller with a winning rags-to-riches success story to tell, and many of the anecdotes he relates are irresistible. The insights Neman conveys will be eye-opening to readers aspiring to the event promotion lifestyle, as when he points out that the real money-move for events is to rent a cheap venue and fill it with high-paying patrons: “Exclusivity doesn’t pay the bills,” he writes, “but by catering” to “the masses, we were able to hit paydirt.”
A vigorous look at a bygone NYC club era—and the business lessons that can be learned from it.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-1637556818
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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