Tuesday, June 20, 2017

The Business of Walt Disney by Barry Linetsky is an excellent book. It is the first real attempt at telling the whole story of Walt's career purely from a business standpoint and it definitely achieves its goal. Barry has done his homework. His book is well researched and an easy read (thankfully, since it is 578-page long). He makes excellent use of all the interviews that have been released via Walt's People over the years and of all the other books about Disney history that were not available to his predecessors.

This is therefore an excellent book to get a great overview of Disney's career and one that the casual Disney history enthusiasts will want to read right away.

When it comes to Disney historians, this book might not quite achieve what they are looking for. If you have read everything that has been written throughout the years about Disney history, then you crave books that tap into new sources of information (very rare articles, new interviews, diaries, correspondence, memos, etc.) This is not what you will find in this book. But then again, there are very, very few Disney history books that offer this these days, so this does not take away from the quality of what Linetsky has achieved.


3 comments:

Christian S. said...

Can it be compared with other history books as The Animated Man, Hollywood Cartoons, Walt Before Mickey and Walt Disney & the American Way of Life, in such quality?

Bob McLain said...

Indeed it can, though unlike those books, it concentrates exclusively on business topics, and does not delve into Disney creative process, animation, etc.

Barry Linetsky said...

Christian: Thanks for your interest. If you go to amazon kindle, you can download the first four chapters as a sample.. That will give you a good indication of the tone and character of the book before purchasing.
Best, Barry Linetsky