Disney History Blog Reviews The Business of Walt Disney

Didier Ghez’s Disney History blog

Didier Ghez, one of the foremost Disney researchers and prolific author of dozens of important books on Walt Disney Studio-related history, is first out of the blocks with a review of my recent book dealing with the business aspects of Walt Disney’s career. The review appeared today at Ghez’s Disney History blog,

The Disney History blog is a great resource for discovering the latest book releases and other miscellaneous items of interest to Disney history buffs. And Ghez’s Walt’s People series of books containing interview transcripts of people who worked with Walt and for the studio is an excellent and highly valuable resource for those with an infatuation for a behind the scenes look at the people and stories that populated Walt’s world. I love reading these interviews and hearing from the artists themselves as they reflect on their own careers and major studio events.

Here’s Didier Ghez’s review in its entirety, published on 20 June 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.

Barry Linetsky is a Partner with The Strategic Planning Group, and author of The Business of Walt Disney and the Nine Principles of His Success (Theme Park Press, 2017). The book, available in print and Kindle editions from amazon.