Twenty-five years ago Anita Roddick founded The Body Shop, a successful combination of hippie chick values and women-celebrating cosmetics. She has written a book about her adventures as saleswoman/avatar of progressive business manuevers/world-renowned activism called BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL. It's a hefty tome that will instigate a great deal of discussion amongst The Body Shop's protractors (rife in England and around the world) and inspire other business owners whose own commitment to socially aware capitalist ventures are just beginning.

Roddick obviously has great self-confidence and is completely and utterly happy with her success and her ability to combine projects and products from indigenous cultures around the globe into the pretty displays in the windows of her easy-to-spot green storefronts. She regales us with a play-by-play of her freeform life experiences as a Kibbutz teacher and restaurateur before heading into her chosen field of cosmetics. As a mother of two, her concern was to create a livelihood for her family while her freewheeling husband was trekking across the Americas. When the family reunited in London, Roddick combined her world traveler expertise with the knowledge she had gained from a wide variety of body rituals she had seen enacted by women around the world; and it was this sense of a global culture that traveled back to her when The Body Shop started up. Soon she was concocting these women's special spiritual oils and balms into a ravishingly successful business, geared at "celebrating women" instead of demeaning them, as the general fashion world seemed to.

Roddick had already written such a book many years ago and self-published it through The Body Shop. This book is very much a fancier rehash of that book, but if you are not familiar with the earlier work, you will find her distinctively open and honest and proud style compelling and the story of her rise to the top of her industry, with her integrity intact (or so she claims), a rousing tale of New World success.

Regardless of whether you ultimately see her as saint or stealer, BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL is a great handbook for today's entrepreneurs who hope to make big bucks while benefiting those around the world whose indigenous crafts and cultural achievements can be exotically entwined into Western Hemisphere life. I enjoyed reading about her life and her exploits, particularly her travels, and have no personal problem with her politics.

Every successful person has their detractors, but it is rare that you get so much from a personal memoir of a business person. Any woman looking for inspiration in her own self-created business stratum will sense in Roddick a soul mate.