Cheap Testosterone Inc.: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild (Book) (Christopher M. Byron) Price

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Customer Reviews of Testosterone Inc.: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild

I am reading a number of books at the moment and just received five new books from Amazon.com including this book. Needless to say, I dropped everything and read this book. It is simply a very funny and enjoyable book 375 pages long, but in large to medium font so you can read it in one or two evenings. Do not be put off or fooled by the book jacket that has an amateurish yellow photo and a girl in a short skirt. This is a well-researched and well-written book.

I read Martha Inc. by the same author Christopher Byron and thought it was a solid well-written book, that rang true, had a lot of research and interviews and was a page turner to read. He is a writer for the New York Post and very skilled as a writer. This book is a bit faster read and a bit lighter, and it jumps around to cover a variety of famous CEO's. I have just finished reading a series of longer books including "Stalin" by Montefiore plus some others and interestingly here Byron uses the same literary techniques as does Montefiore in his large and serious biography of Stalin. What he does is first look at many public sources on the CEO's, then he does interviews (90) to try and piece everything together and give context plus add new information, then he inserts black and white photographs into the book as we proceed, such as photos of Dennis and Karen Kozlowski, Ron Perelman's fourth wife Jack Welch together with Suzy Wetlaufer, etc. It makes it all very entertaining and a compelling light read.

There are many things that stick out in the book and I will not repeat those here, but in one case he compares different versions (hard cover and soft cover) of "Straight From the Gut" by Jack Welch and the author points out how the "soul mate" has changed in the book, and how the credit for Jack's second wife Jane was reduced from some fraction of a chapter in the first hard cover edition to one or two line in the soft cover version a few years later. But the accolades in one book are transferred to a new woman in the second version. It is amazing how one man's biography can quickly and retroactively change!

There are too many stories to repeat here but it is all very entertaining. The men come of as out of control classless fools, but in some cases they are aided and abetted by some wily or equally foolish women.

I am giving it 4 stars because of the humorous nature of the book, and light read. Strongly recommend and very funny.

Jack in Toronto

A Must Read -
It's about time! I found this book to be the proverbial page turner. Hysterically funny at times, yet equally disturbing. Many of the stories and accompanying facts within, I've never seen reported elsewhere. They certainly deserve to be out there and examined for all to see. The truth eventually "outs" itself. If ever there was a book to make Corporate America sit and take a long hard look at their chosen heroes of the 1980's and 1990's, it's "Testosterone, Inc". If this book doesn't make a case for that, not much else will. No wonder men such as Jack Welch don't want this book out there for all to read. The third Mrs. Welch is obviously just as lacking in ethics and decency as her new husband. It's a perfect match. What I want to know is... when's the movie?

Nice angle, terrible book....
Hoping to gain some insight into the behavior of Corporate Exec gone bad, I picked up this book........

MISTAKE!

This book is the National Enquirer of books. Ridiculous pop psychology that would make a first-year psych. student howl with laughter (It was the testosterone! No. Wait. It was because his mother called him a punk!)

The footnote system is insane. Memo to Mr. Bryon: the use of metaphors (such as Lillith) typically do require footnotes to explain them.

Conclusions and assumptions made by others are pushed aside to give more room to Mr. Byron's equally fallacious assumptions and illogical conclusions.

Poorly written. Poorly edited.

All this, plus, Mr. Byron sets the men's movement back 20 years with his male-bashing biological reductionism and stereotyping.

Too bad. An insightful book on this topic is sorely needed. Anyone know of one?