Monday, March 25, 2013

Read it a couple of times, it'll make sense and you won't like it.

My Facebook feed has been full of cover shots of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In. One woman was reading it on my bus this morning, intent on squeezing career tips into her commute. Any frequenter of used bookshops can trace the sedimentary layers of careerist advice tomes as they are slowly abandoned: What Color is Your Parachute? Who Moved My Cheese? The Sandberg fad puts one in mind of male 80s go-getters with copies of Iacocca tucked under their arms. I haven't read the book and don't plan to; after reading enough dueling reviews and discussions of its contents, the book itself seems superfluous. But as a connoisseur of dissections of Lean In as a phenomenon, I think this is perhaps definitive.

Monday, March 04, 2013