Review by Booklist Review
Like a cat with nine lives, Freston charges through a drama-filled life, leaving counterculture entertainment sprawling in his wake. Pairing his life's "key passions" of music and travel with business acumen, Freston here recounts the details of his meteoric career. With pacing resembling a thriller, Freston traces his evolution from a teen with classic lawn-mowing and paper-route beginnings to his launch into a work life that included rubbing elbows with David Bowie, Fidel Castro, Oprah, and Bono. Corporate opportunities unfold through happenstance, all while Freston lives a nomadic life. He bounces through top-tier companies, moving from managing advertising accounts for G.I. Joe and Scope to leading MTV Networks and creating Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and TV Land, among other ventures. There is never a dull moment when it comes to Freston's experiences, and readers are led through brushes with law, both foreign and domestic, and even a failed kidnapping. A fun and fascinating memoir of business and beyond, recommended for public library collections.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This freewheeling debut memoir from Freston, former CEO of MTV Networks, is equal parts industry tell-all, escapist travelogue, and glittering glimpse into the golden age of music videos. Freston focuses on his professional accomplishments, from attending business school to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War to developing the clothing company Hindu Kush while living in India and Afghanistan in the 1970s. After taking a marketing job with a budding cable startup in 1980, Freston helped build MTV from the ground up before expanding its footprint to include Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. Freston brings readers into the boardroom to witness the development of MTV's brand, behind the scenes of early VMAs, and into a five-hour lunch with Fidel Castro in an attempt to "start some relationships in the creative community," during which Castro revealed that The Sopranos was his favorite show. While the business-heavy sections border on information overload, this is certain to teach anyone curious about or nostalgic for the music video revolution something they didn't know. It's a memorable ride. Agent: Amanda Urban, CAA. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 showYo! 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
