Solid business writing that will interest budding moguls.
The Forbes senior editor of media and entertainment takes a look at modern show business–based entrepreneurship.
Hollywood has always had its business-minded celebrities: Think of Fess Parker, who bought up vast swaths of Southern California real estate, or Roy Rogers, who built a restaurant chain in his name. The new breed, writes Greenburg, is likelier to invest in intangibles and speculative tech-based ventures. One to whom he pays particular attention is Ashton Kutcher, who built a considerable fortune playing film characters such as, fittingly enough, Steve Jobs and starring in one of the most popular series on TV, earning him the highest salary in the business. With a partner, Kutcher founded an investment fund worth $30 million in 2010 that soon grew to more than $250 million. The author credits him with doing his own homework and following an investment philosophy: “look for companies solving a real problem…and consider unglamorous sectors.” It’s a philosophy that other celebrities, from Shaquille O’Neal to Jennifer Lopez and a small army of hip-hop stars, have taken to following. Examples include investment in a Los Angeles–based “company that makes companies,” software that rounds up purchases and invests the change in index funds, and a “Fitbit for cows” that tracks a bovine critter’s reproductive health and other issues. Having celebrity spokespeople and investors helps, but the companies Greenburg profiles are absolutely on track in solving real problems, even if they are sometimes real problems that most of us don’t have—e.g., how to snag a seat on a charter jet in the same way an earthbound traveler summons a rideshare driver. Though at heart his book is an extended magazine article, there’s plenty of interest here, especially when the author looks at inventive philanthropy such as Matt Damon’s Water.org, which brings plumbing to poor communities but also works “to create venture funds that generate low single-digit returns by giving cheap microloans.”
Solid business writing that will interest budding moguls.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-48508-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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