Threshold Resistance: The Extraordinary Career of a Luxury Retailing Pioneer

This autobiography is subtitled “the extraordinary career of a luxury retailing pioneer,” but there is a question which arises, and that is: “If you are a builder of shopping centers” does that qualify you to be an authority on the retail business?

 The writer was never in the retail business, but feels free to dispense some sort of dime-store knowledge about running a store, not to mention that he is basically one of the greatest retailers that has ever come along in the history of retailing.  This hubris can only be classified as extreme exaggeration. One of the other troubling facts about the book is that Mr. Taubman has conveniently omitted his first marriage almost completely, and then seems to have neglected the fact that they divorced.  While supposedly being a “devoted” father, he does manage to say he travelled so much of the time during his children’s youths. Mr. Taubman certainly has taken the opportunity to not only  impress us with his superb parenting skills and retail knowledge, but also to remind us of how many boards he sat on and who his very powerful and influential friends are/were.  The entire purpose of this tome seems to be that he wanted the world to know just how fabulous he is. Most important, he stresses, is his honesty and his unjust conviction for price fixing. The last offense occurred during his ownership of Sotheby’s. From the tone of his writing, one might have thought he was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor when in fact it was about 10 months of prison.  Yes, he was made an example of, no he was not the authority of the art world he thought he was, and neither is he  the first nor the last that the American Justice system may betray. One must wonder if he really believes that if he had not acquired such wealth, would he have been asked to sit on boards, become a philanthropist, and have the friends he has/had, or for that matter, married his second (trophy) wife. The entire tone of this little story is extremely self-serving, not to mention misleading when you consider the parts that never made it into print. Reviewer Jeffrey Felner is a columnist in Woman 2 Woman Magazine: Fashion by the Rules, and continues a long and successful career in jewelry and fashion design and merchandising.