Customer Reviews

Who Moved My Soap?: The CEO's Guide to Surviving Prison: The Bernie Madoff Edition

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I first encountered Andy Borowitz's wicked satirical wit on NPR, and then more recently have been enjoying his brilliant one-liners on CNN. Then I got hooked on his Borowitz Report column after reading a glowing front page story about him in The Wall Street Journal. If you've never read Borowitz, Who Moved My Soap? is the perfect place to start. It's a hysterically funny take on the recent spate of corporate scandals, but it's more than that: it contains Borowitz's totally original, totally side-splitting riffs on pop culture, celebrities, politics, and even the Zagat guide and feng shui. The chapters are punchy and short, so it's the ideal funny book to read in little bits during a day at the beach. And it stays with you -- I read it days ago and I'm still quoting jokes to friends.

One warning, though. While Who Moved My Soap? is the perfect beach read, if you read it on the beach you're bound to get strange looks from those around you as you find yourself laughing uncontrollably. That's what happened to me on the beach in Rhode Island, and people kept coming over to ask me what was so funny. The next day, I spotted four more people reading Who Moved My Soap? Mark my words, it's the book of the summer.

This book is just hilarious! Borowitz hits the nail on the head with some of his "tips" for CEOs headed for prison. The funniest chapter was The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Prisoners. It just kept me rolling. If you're tired of CEOs' antics, pick this book up, it's totally worth it.

Modern corporate world is a sty reeking of corporate scandals. This, despite a whole deluge of corporate "gurus" and biz books dispensing truckloads of advice on how to better run your company, manage your time, manage your employees, etc etc.

Trust Andy Borowitz to rip the vacuity of almost 90% of such advisory tripe to shreds. He hammers home the drudgery of business cliches in an absolutely hilariously anti-establishment satire. It's an easy to read compilation, you could devour it in a couple of hours if you wish (and you mostly likely will).

The title itself is a funny play on "Who moved my cheese", a monumentally boring bestseller from a few years ago about change management. As one of the reviews suggests, change is something a lot of disillusioned CEOs like Martha Stewart have to cope with in their newfound abodes.

Pick up this gem for some pure, unadulterated, and occasionally even laught-out-loud humor. Pronto purchase material!

This book will give new meaning to such corporate phrases as "back-stabbing", "the 'Peter' principle" and "360 degree employee management". Borowitz, in his unique and humorous style, pinpoints the gaping flaws inherent in the 'Rock Star CEO' mentality that exist today. Borowitz really proves that the emporer has no clothes - and that becomes quite problematic during the prison phase of the CEO's life. The book is an excellent, refreshing and lighthearted look at where capitalism went astray. The ability to laugh at ourselves is essential and Borowitz provides and excellent vehicle to achieve those ends. A highly recommended read.

Borowitz writes an understated book attacking the now-discredited CEO-as-god/You-Too-Can-Be-Rich genre. Some of this book is very funny, but it is funny because it is a straight-faced reductio ad absurdum of the corporate cheer leading that tried to justify the ugly 1990s financial bubble.

The reading will be slow going for those who have not read the trite school of popular business writing. The style of this book is a deadpan parody of such "classics" as THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE and the mountains of stupid books that tried to explain Sun Tzu's THE ART OF WAR to holders of MBAs. The humorous hook is the whole idea that (a) once-respected and worshipped hot shots are really criminals, and (b) that prison environments are actually the logical conclusion of how corporate management would operate--if they could get away with it. His almost verbatim exposition of how a prison business can follow of Jack Welch's Six Sigma bullying of employees shows just how destructive American B-school ideology is.

Finally, the admirable Alex Coolman, of Stop Prison Rape (SPR.org) attacks this book for making fun of the horrors of sexual assault; I respectfully disagree with Mr. Coolman. SOAP has no explicit or vicious writing (the style is too deadpan for anything vulgar). SOAP conflates two worlds of power--prison and corporate back stabbing--and finds both to be totally immoral.

WHO MOVED MY SOAP? is a tale that exposes our sorry times.

Martha Stewart and Ken Lay won't like this book, but the rest of us will laugh out loud from page one all the way to the end. If you've lost your job, or just your pension plan thanks to crooked CEOs, this book is the best medicine. Who Moved My Soap is a masterpiece -- I put it up there with the best of David Sedaris, Steve Martin or Dave Barry. And for those of us who have very little left in their 401(k), it's hard to beat the price.

I never believed that old cliche about laughter being the best medicine until my best friend gave me "Who Moved My Soap" to read. I recently lost my job and had been down in the dumps, looking for work in this lousy economy. This book put an instant smile on my face! Anyone who's ever had a lousy boss or other workplace woes will completely love it. I passed it on to another friend (who happened to have lost almost all of his 401k thanks to crooked CEOs) and he said it was the funniest book he's ever read. But it's more than just funny... it's TRUE!

I didn't have much hope for WHO MOVED MY SOAP? The CEO's Guide to Surviving in Prison. At first blush it seemed that Andy Borowitz was playing to a limited audience, constructing a kind of lampoon of the bestselling WHO MOVED MY CHEESE? while skewering white-collar criminals. Nothing really much to laugh at. But that's why we read the books. And WHO MOVED MY SOAP? turns out to be interesting, well-done, and very funny.

WHO MOVED MY SOAP? is intended as a satirical guide for the CEO who finds himself going to prison. It is written in the voice of a convicted CEO who has survived prison and is now sharing his expertise with others who find themselves in similar straits. By "prison," Borowitz is not referring to the minimum security facilities where inmates spend their day tending to well-manicured lawns or reading in spotless libraries in between trips to the salad bar and conjugal visits from the Mrs. No, Borowitz is talking "prison" here, Oz territory, where the issue of "Who moved my soap?" can become quite important.

Admittedly, it does take Borowitz a few pages to get things moving. Given that WHO MOVED MY SOAP? is less than 100 pages in length, he does not have many to squander. Accordingly the first third of WHO MOVED MY SOAP? is more of a warm-up than anything else, with Borowitz putting a tongue-in-cheek positive spin on the executive going to prison.

It is in the second third of the book, however, that Borowitz really begins to shine. His chapter dealing with prison slang is...well, it's a riot, but it really serves to get the blood moving for the chapter dealing with meals. "Prison Food: Don't Pick Up the Check" begins with a hilarious --- and, let's face it --- an accurate comparison between prison mess halls and five-star restaurants. Borowitz really takes off though when he reviews the mess halls of various prisons, Zagat-style. Anyone familiar with that particular guide will be howling at Borowitz's viciously accurate send-up of it.

This is followed by a chapter entitled "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Prisoners," which is yet another parody within a parody, containing recommendations to "Be Proactive," "Think Win/Win," and the all-important "Sharpen Your Saw." There is also a chapter dealing with "Prison Cell Feng Shui," which includes such commonsense but often-overlooked suggestions as "(a)rrange your bunk so that you face the bars, not away from them." Borowitz concludes with chapters dealing with that up-and-coming problem of female CEOs in prison and those all-important exit strategies, including the planning and execution of what is known as fence parole.

Borowitz has a breezy, conversational writing style and if he has an occasional tendency to reach too quickly for the obvious joke he is also quite capable of formulating an insightful, original jibe and exploiting it to its fullest potential. I'm not entirely sure who, or where, the audience is for WHO MOVED MY SOAP?, but it certainly deserves one.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

This book manages to meld both insightful commentary on today's business world, entertainment world and social scene with some of the funniest lines I've ever read. The storyline, about a CEO from a huge conglomerate named Shamco (which seems to make a lot of products that do not work, but enables the CEO to live like a potentate anyway) had tears running down my face. I won't wreck the book for you - read it yourself (and maybe send one to Martha Stewart).

Borowitz has written a truly funny book, and it's extra special because it's a satire of another concept others have taken so seriously. It's not so funny, though, when you really get "surprised" from behind in prison, if you know what I mean.