Mitzi Sturgeon White

...And for the first time I lament that we can't give a book no stars. This book is awful. White uses the story of The Wizard of Oz to illustrate what she thinks are the important components to becoming a "superstar" at whatever one chooses to do with one's life, but she both misses entirely the point of that story and her goal of making what superstardom requires clear.

White has chosen 52 different superstars to "profile," but given the number of subjects and the space she's allotted herself, we only get a great deal of detail about a handful: Richard Branson, who comes across as a fatuous asshole who uses people for fun and profit, and Sam Walton, friend of every working man except the ones who work for him, get a great deal of the attention, as do Anita Roddick, the seemingly hapless founder of The Body Shop, Lance Armstrong, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Gates, Jack Welch (of GE) and Lee Iacocca (formerly fired from Ford). Everybody else is mentioned more or less in passing.

White's book is poorly structured and poorly written. It meanders through the points she thinks one should take away from The Wizard of Oz, throwing in anecdotes from the life stories of her chosen superstars with little useful analysis and failing to explain how it was really these individuals' inherent qualities, rather than luck and connections, that made them successful despite whatever obstacles they encountered. She also throws in irritating, sappy personal anecdotes like this: "When a student in one of my classes at Harvard says, 'Oh, I made a mistake,' my reply is, 'We don't have mistakes in my class. We only have learning experiences.'" This is perhaps one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read in print.

The back cover of the book notes that she's an instructor at Harvard Med, and notes quite prominently that her JD and Ph.D. are both from Harvard (she styles herself "M.S. White, PhD, JD" on the book cover), which may already tell you everything you need to know about the inside of the book.

The book might've been helped by choosing fewer people to focus on and by giving coherent, linear biographies of them that showed them overcoming shortcomings and external challenges, but White is so married to her inapt parallel to The Wizard of Oz that the reader comes away from the book with no clear idea of what skills, outlooks, qualities, or talents she really thinks are useful, or of how to apply them in the reader's own quest for greatness.

This book was recommended to me as a way to look at ways successful people had identified their weaknesses and failings and used that knowledge to their advantage, and I think such a book would have been interesting. This, however, is emphatically not that book. There is a reason it is not at your local library.… (mehr)