Reads like a thriller ... Read masterfully illuminates the tricks and sleights of hand that in multilevel marketing are simply the rules of doing business ... An almost prosecutorial case against many multilevel marketing schemes ... Read captures...heartache.
Gripping and instructive ... More about the scammers and their stratagems than it is about the scammed. Even by the end of the book, it remains somewhat difficult to fathom why so many people are taken in by what seems like such an obvious grift ... Nonetheless, the history Read recounts allows readers to infer how MLM might win over adherents ... A vivid portrait.
Engaging ... Weaving in sympathetic portrayals of women who lost money and friends after working with MLM schemes, [Read] recasts them as victims of a multigenerational swindle ... Read writes with scorn about the industry’s early architects...but she never disparages her sources, whose stories of drained bank accounts and dashed dreams she portrays only with empathy ... These vignettes keep the human toll of the schemes top of mind ... Read’s indictment of MLM outfits is predictable enough, but her research also reveals how much corporate America has in common with this shady economy, which has long been dismissed as a kooky sideshow ... Read ably explains why these businesses have appealed to generations of underpaid and insecure American workers ... Read names the leaders who benefit, and in doing so, she delivers a damning portrait of those who take advantage—and she humanizes the people they rip off ... She calls things what they are.
Read’s book is a huge addition to the mix, expertly and carefully walking readers through the history of MLMs and revealing them for what they really are ... MLMs have too long operated in the dark, but, for all the light it sheds, Read’s book makes you wonder if the industry has simply grown too large and too powerful to regulate or reform.
A well-paced polemic ... [Read] makes a compelling case that nearly every American MLM can, in some form or another, be traced back up the pyramid to Rehnborg and his middling vitamins. And some of the best reveals of her reporting arise when she uncovers surprising connections ... But the book’s most interesting feat is its semantic dissection of direct selling ... Well-reported, entertaining ... Amid a glut of recent books promising to distill America’s present political turmoil into a single subject, Read’s pitch is more modest than most, and more credible for it.
