"The journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight can be useful, even revelatory, but it can also obscure."

"[Zappos' 'founder' Tony] Hsieh, in the end, was a rich guy who, early in his career, used his Harvard connections and some seed money to buy a series of lotto tickets in the tech boom, and then used his expanding wealth and influence to spread a bunch of marketing, in the form of pseudo-psychology, into the world. He slept with his employees and terrorized his closest friends. His descent into addiction and his untimely death were certainly tragic, but I couldn’t find much to admire about Hsieh in 'Wonder Boy,' nor did I understand why I was reading dozens of meticulously reported, almost snuff-film-like pages about his journey into ketamine addiction and mania.... [We never learn] how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh’s generation of tech evangelists."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Tony Hsieh and the Emptiness of the Tech-Mogul Myth/A new biography of the Zappos executive depicts him as a narcissist and an addict who tossed around half-baked ideas and rarely saw them through" (The New Yorker).

Is there a "journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight"? I hadn't noticed. Once you decide to write a whole book about someone, you're committed to "humanizing" that one human being, I suppose. There's always the question: Why write a book about this person?

A biographer has got to feel pretty sensitive as he struggles with the dullness of the facts he's got to inflate to book length. This is the story of a shoe saleman! He took drugs, but drug stories are basically alike. Why read about a tech exec on drugs when there are so many episodes of "Behind the Music" to watch?

There is one extraordinary thing about Hsieh, his fiery death. I'm guessing the book puts that scene in the beginning so the reader — the creepy reader — doesn't get impatient waiting for it. Is that humanizing — waiting for a man to be consumed by flames?

"He was entranced by fire — with a real-estate agent recalling seeing an estimated 1,000 candles in Hsieh’s Park City, Utah, home..."

"'[He] explained to me that the candles were a symbol of what life was like in a simpler time'.... The quirky entrepreneur... also liked to use a heater in his girlfriend’s shed to decrease his oxygen level, sources told the media outlet. Hsieh also inhaled nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, a k a whippets, to try to decrease his oxygen use.... But playing with his oxygen intake was only one part of Hsieh’s manipulation of his body. Hsieh would go on a 26-day alphabet diet, in which he would only eat foods starting with a single letter each day, such as 'a' the first 24 hours, 'b' the second, and so on, nearly fasting by the letter 'z'.... He got down to 100 pounds at one point.... Hsieh also would see how long he could go without urinating.... A pal told the Journal that Hsieh was like 'the Giving Tree' — the selfless character in the Shel Silverstein kiddie classic that gives so much of itself that it is left with nothing."

From "Zappos founder Tony Hsieh spent last hours planning to enter rehab" (NY Post).

The Giving Tree was giving — sacrificing to provide the boy with benefits. Hsieh's sacrifices did not give anyone else anything but merely pared away from the person making the sacrifices. You'll have to imagine an alternative children's book called "The Giving Up Tree." 

Even in "The Giving Tree," we question whether the tree — that is, the person represented by the tree — should have given everything. Shouldn't the boy — at some point — have learned about giving from the tree and become a giver himself? Shouldn't he have given back? 

But "The Giving Up Tree" is not going to become a children's classic. Decreasing oxygen intake, resisting peeing, eating quince and quinoa on the 17th day of a highly conceptual diet. 

Well, I admit that alphabet books are popular with children. Maybe there already is a book that begins "On the first day, X ate applesauce and angel hair pasta...." and ends "On the 27th day, he was dead."

Oh! I know where I got that line. I was given "Struwwelpeter" when I was a child, and I remember "The Story of Augustus, Who Would Not Have Any Soup":

Augustus was a chubby lad; 

Fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had: 

And everybody saw with joy 

The plump and hearty, healthy boy. 

He ate and drank as he was told, 

And never let his soup get cold. 

But one day, one cold winter's day, 

He screamed out "Take the soup away! 

O take the nasty soup away! 

I won't have any soup today." 

Next day, now look, the picture shows 

How lank and lean Augustus grows! 

Yet, though he feels so weak and ill, 

The naughty fellow cries out still 

"Not any soup for me, I say: 

O take the nasty soup away! 

I won't have any soup today." 

The third day comes: Oh what a sin! 

To make himself so pale and thin. 

Yet, when the soup is put on table, 

He screams, as loud as he is able, 

"Not any soup for me, I say: 

O take the nasty soup away! 

I WON'T have any soup today."  

Look at him, now the fourth day's come! 

He scarcely weighs a sugar-plum; 

He's like a little bit of thread, 

And, on the fifth day, he was—dead! 

Go to the "Struwwelpeter" link to see the illustrations of the rapid weight loss that befalls anorexic Augustus. And look for the also-relevant "Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches":

...But Harriet would not take advice: 

She lit a match, it was so nice! 

It crackled so, it burned so clear— 

Exactly like the picture here. 

She jumped for joy and ran about 

And was too pleased to put it out....

"Struwwelpeter" is a powerfully memorable book. It was written — in German — in 1835 — by a psychiatrist.  

Would you give that to your sweet little child? Is it more or less dangerous than "The Giving Tree"? 

I wonder what books influenced Tony Hsieh. 

He, himself wrote a book, "Delivering Happiness." It was a best-seller in its time. Who will read it now? Here's a 1-star review at Amazon, written before Hsieh's untimely death:

For full transparency I only read the first third of this book before I took it to Goodwill. I just couldn't take anymore. It's written at a very low educational level which goes to show, you don't really need brains to be rich or even be a billionaire, what your really really must have is Luck and a lot of it....

Even when you have a lot of luck, you can run out. 

"The male is barricaded inside and not answering the door. Everyone else is outside the house. They are trying to get him to open up."

Said the dispatcher quoted in "Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh was 'barricaded' in a shed when blaze broke out, as colleagues suspect his addiction to burning candles, Grey Goose vodka, and nitrous oxide whippets triggered the explosion that led to his death" (Daily Mail). 

Recently... nitrous oxide had become his drug of choice, taking it in the form of 'whippets' straight from the cartridge of a whipped cream dispenser. 'He would take dozens of them a day,' the colleague said. 'He lived a crazy, eccentric life. The drugs often made him hallucinate, he became paranoid — that could explain why he barricaded himself in,' he added. 'Tony was very fond of candles. He liked to set the atmosphere.' 'The guess is that he managed to ignite one of the nitrous oxide canisters which caused a small explosion that killed him.'... 

"The multimillionaire former CEO of online shoe store Zappos died on Friday, nine days after he was dragged unconscious by firefighters from a blazing Connecticut house..."

"... in the middle of the night. Tony Hsieh, who was worth an estimated $840 million, had retired three months earlier from the billion-dollar business he helped found, and was just 46 years old. The alarm was raised at 3:30am on November 18 and firefighters forced their way into the New London home after being told someone was trapped inside.... He insisted on a $36,000 annual salary... and he sat in an unassuming cubicle among the other employees. When Zappos set up a new warehouse in Kentucky, the paper said, he packed a pickup truck with materials, drove to Kentucky and got to work bolting together shelves and unpacking shoes.... Hsieh, who had a passion for llamas and alpacas, had a pet alpaca named Marley and dog Blizzy. He lived in an Airstream trailer, part of a village... known as Llamapolis... [I]n 2014, he transformed a parking lot in the city into a 'micro-living oasis', made up of around 30 RVs. He also had two pet llamas which lived in the trailer park community with him. As of 2020, he was still living in the tiny trailer, unmarried and with no children."

The Daily Mail reports.

Here's a view inside Hsieh's Airstream:

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, talks about leadership.

First, let me say that I ordered these sandals from Zappos and had them at my door less than 20 hours later. And that was with the free shipping option, not any kind of express service. So that makes me very pro-Zappos right now. So here's Hsieh:

Tony Hsieh: Every employee understands that part of their job description is actually to live and inspire the culture in others. A lot of it is done on the front end; during the hiring process we do two sets of interviews. The first set is kind of the standard -- the hiring manager and his or her team will look for someone to a fit within the team, relevant experience, technical ability and so on, but then we do a separate, second set of interviews with our HR team, and they look purely for a culture fit, and they have to pass both in order to be hired. We have passed on a lot of smart and talented people that we know can make an immediate impact on our top or bottom line but if they are not a culture fit, we won't hire them.

Tom Heath: What do you ask them, when you want to know if they can fit in the culture, and whether they will or not?

Tony Hsieh: We offer tours to the public, and our headquarters are in Las Vegas. We will pick you up at the airport, ride in the Zappos shuttle, take an hour long tour and then drop you off at the hotel.

For candidates we do the same thing: We pick them up, give them a tour, and then they spend the day interviewing. But at the end of the interview process, our head of recruiting goes back to the shuttle driver and asks them how they were treated. If they were not treated well when they thought they were off the clock then we won't hire them, it's not even a question.