From the NYT review:
The travails of the American salesman grew gnarlier in the 20th century. For one, some of these salesmen are now women. Also, many are newly self-employed, thanks to the growing industry of multilevel marketing. Bridget Read’s “Little Bosses Everywhere” reads like a thriller as it investigates the birth and growth of this shadowy and sprawling industry that polished up door-to-door sales with a new veneer of all-American entrepreneurialism....“Little Bosses Everywhere” lays out an almost prosecutorial case against many multilevel marketing schemes...When Read introduces the characters behind America’s first big multilevel marketing scheme, it almost sounds like the setup to a joke: What happens when a Gilded Age dilettante, a eugenics-curious Dale Carnegie acolyte and an overzealous marketer of burial plots come together? The answer is