UNPLUGGED

An account of one executive’s rise in the entertainment industry, with a long stint at MTV.

Freston’s memoir starts with a low point in his career: being fired as CEO of the mass media conglomerate Viacom by Sumner Redstone, the company’s mercurial chair. “On Redstone’s CEO firing scoreboard, I’d set a new speed record: eight months on the job,” he notes, wryly. Readers will be forgiven if they therefore expect a book full of score settling and bitterness, but this book is something different: a cheerfully optimistic look at the life and career of a man whose path to the business world was somewhat unconventional. Freston did get an MBA degree after his undergraduate career, which he readily admits was in order to escape the Vietnam War draft, and he worked in advertising before embarking on a peripatetic journey across the world, making stops in Morocco and Greece, and then Afghanistan and India, which inspired him to found a company that imported garments from the two countries for the American market. Music and pop-culture fans will appreciate Freston’s account of the origins of MTV, for whom he worked as a “marketing guy” before rising through the ranks to become president: “To me, over in marketing, MTV was a lot like Kabul. An exotic new place with a crazy cast of wild characters and few rules…and fun as hell.” He owns up to the network’s early neglect of Black artists, and notes that the show Yo! MTV Raps “saved our white asses.” Freston is impressively self-aware, at one point urging readers to take one of his rare grudges “with a grain of salt and a handful of sour grapes.”

An unexpectedly charming and self-effacing business memoir.