My Life in Advertising

Hopkins opens his life story with a joke that is also a thesis: "The greatest event in my career occurred a year before I was born." His father, he explains, selected for him a Scotch mother.

From her, he says, came thrift, caution, ambition and an appetite for work that bordered on the absurd. From his father, a clergyman's son in a long line of poor clergymen, came something he counts as just as lucky: poverty.

Hold on to that pairing, because the rest of the book keeps drawing on it. Out of those two inheritances came caution, industry and the common touch, and nearly every campaign in the later chapters, from carpet sweepers to toothpaste, leans on all three at once.