Her critics, some of them without first reading her book, have belittled Lean In as a 'vanity project.' The wittiest takedown I've read is a piece by Noreen Malone in The New Republic, which focuses on Sandberg's name-dropping: As Malone notes, the 'acknowledgements' section of Lean In runs to seven and a half pages and lists 140 people, among them: Oprah Winfrey, Gloria Steinem, Arianna Huffington and Sandberg's old treasury secretary boss and undergraduate mentor, Larry Summers. Sandberg was named the fifth most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine - all this, in addition to raising two young children in concert with a totally supportive spouse.) (She has two Harvard degrees and a personal worth just shy of $1 billion. Lean In, which Sandberg describes as 'sort of a feminist manifesto,' has been slammed by Maureen Dowd, Jodi Kantor, Judith Shulevitz and others for its elitism, for being hard on women and soft on institutional sexism and for making an unfair exemplar of the 43-year-old Sandberg's own Amazonian accomplishments. Zuckerberg told her that her 'desire to be liked by everybody would hold back.' I hope she's worked on that problem because over the past few weeks, there sure have been a lot of people hating on Sheryl Sandberg.

Sheryl Sandberg tells an anecdote in her new book, Lean In, about sitting down with her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, for her first performance review as chief operating officer at Facebook.

Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Lean In Subtitle Women, Work, and the Will to Lead Author Sheryl Sandberg

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