Here is an excerpt from an article by Sara Nelson and featured by Amazon.com. To read the complete article, please click here.

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By any measure, Sheryl Sandberg is a big success. Smart, rich, powerful, the 43-year-old COO of Facebook, wife, mother-of-two “has it all,” as they used to say. But Sandberg doesn’t take her successes for granted — hell, no! She worked hard for them — and she’s intent on helping other women learn to lead.

Her book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, is out March 12, and has already garnered lots of passionate opinions. We chose her book as one of the Best of the Month and chatted with her a week or so before it went on sale.

Some things we learned:

• Sandberg considers Lean In (the book) and Lean In (the foundation the book launches), to be unisex and ageless. Men and women need to work together to change the culture, she says. “I think this is everyone’s issue,” she says. She then tells me that even her 70-something mother was inspired by it — and is now planning to have a Bat Mitzvah, an opportunity not available to her when she was 13.

• She doesn’t seem particularly surprised by the flack she’s gotten in some corners of the press for “blaming” women instead of corporations and government. “I always knew this topic would incite strong debate. It’s about us, about our passions.”

• Some critics also suggest Sandberg’s opinions are mere clones of last century’s feminism — which, ironically, Sandberg admits to having undervalued at the time. “Looking back, it made no sense for my college friends and me to distance ourselves from the hard-won achievements of earlier feminists. We should have cheered their efforts.”

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Sara Nelson became the Editorial Director of Amazon.com after working as books editor at O, the Oprah magazine, and as editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. In other words, her job for many, many years has been to read a lot of books and talk and write a lot about books. Tough life, huh?