Different

This much I'll say about Youngme Moon's Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd: if ever a book on business and marketing could be described as so beautiful to read it's almost painful, this must be it.

Oozing with candor, there's a certain poetic quality to the book, which I dare say is cut from the same cloth as Rob Walker's Buying In: intelligent, acutely observant, and so elegantly written. There is no multi-point agenda intended to make better marketers out of its readers, no indiscriminate use of business jargon to clothe her words in an air of legitimacy and intellectual appeal. No: what Different has to offer are salient points about all that is wrong with the meaningless product differentiation characteristic of mature product brand management, told in a straightforward manner that any human being can empathize with and understand.

As business books go, Different is honest, insightful, and -- surprise! -- itself meaningfully different. I can pay the book no bigger compliment than that.