For me, this book is personal.

At first glance, I grew up in a typical household. My mother was (and still is) a registered nurse (RN). My father was trained as an accountant. When we were younger, my brother and I went to school and then let ourselves into our apartment to wait for one of my parents to come home and make dinner (‘latchkey kids’ is the term they used back then). I went on to graduate high school, then college, then law school, before taking a job, first at a law firm, then at a government agency, before eventually ending up in my dream job – teaching as a law professor in the United States.

And yet, in many ways, my life was not typical at all. When I was eight, my mother moved my brother and myself to Canada. After my mom and dad separated, I ended up living most of my teenage years with my dad and my stepmom, helping to take care of my younger siblings. We moved a lot. My dad and my stepmom became serial entrepreneurs, chasing various business opportunities (both in the United States and Canada), trying to provide for our ever-growing family. This provided for a less than stable life, but it was the only life I knew so I didn't mind. In the meantime, my mother was trying to make it as a part-time single mom, taking care of my older brother – trying to put him in the best schools, trying to provide him with a solid foundation.

Although I didn't know it then, the growing intersection between businesses and the larger society around us was fundamentally shaping the world in which I lived. My mother, who has been practicing as an RN since 1959, has become first disillusioned and now downright cynical about the role that pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies have had on our right to health. Much of the reason why my father turned to running his own business is because of the outright discrimination he faced at the hands of accounting firms that didn't feel comfortable having a black face examine the books of their white shoe companies.