In “Little Bosses Everywhere,” journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time.

“Little Bosses Everywhere” exposes the deceptions of direct-selling companies that make their profit not off customers but off their own sales force.

The book lays out an almost prosecutorial case against many multilevel marketing schemes, explaining why regulators need to take the industry seriously, and the larger story it tells about whom the economy has set up to fail. 

The book “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,” said a review in The New York Times.

The book primarily focuses on a broader analysis of pyramid schemes and their history.