Book club - KC Metro

A riveting investigation into the turbulent life of Zappos visionary Tony Hsieh, whose radical business strategies revolutionized both the tech world and corporate culture, based on rigorous research and reporting by two seasoned journalists

Tony Hsieh’s first successful venture was in middle school, selling personalized buttons. At Harvard, he made a profit compiling and selling study guides. In 1998, Hsieh sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 million. About a decade later, he sold online shoe empire Zappos to Amazon for $1.2 billion.

The secret to his success? Making his employees happy.

At its peak, Zappos’s employee-friendly culture was so famous across the tech industry that it became one of the hardest companies to get hired at, and CEOs from other companies regularly toured the headquarters. But Hsieh’s vision for change didn’t stop with corporate culture: Hsieh went on to move Zappos headquarters to Las Vegas and personally funded a nine-figure campaign to revitalize the city’s historic downtown area. There, he could be found living in an Airstream and chatting up the locals. But Hsieh’s forays into community-revival projects spun out of control as his issues with mental health and addiction ramped up, creating the opportunity for more enablers than friends to stand in his mercurial good graces.

This WWII-era book tells the story of three women in Berlin, Paris, and New York, all fighting against fascism and censorship through the power of books (and maybe some stronger actions, too). It was inspired by the very real Council of Books in Wartime comprised of booksellers, publishers, authors, and librarians who used books and the ideas they hold as a weapon.

After her father suffers a crisis of conscience and leaves his post as pastor to a sleepy village in the south of England, Margaret Hale and her parents move north to the industrial city of Milton. There, her father begins to tutor John Thornton, one of the local mill owners. Sympathetic toward the mill workers and their fight for higher wages, she initially detests him and the class he represents, but as she comes to spend more time with Mr. Thornton, she begins to wonder if she might have misjudged him.

Women doctors, while not overrunning the profession, can hardly be termed rare or unusual today. Yet in the middle decades of nineteenth-century America and Europe, they were just coming on stage. Olivia Campbell’s Women in White Coats chronicles the story of three ambitious, motivated women.