Fascinating U-turn in the middle…
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The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 10 years in jail; Adam Neumann got a billion-dollar payday and has returned from the ashes to found a cryptocurrency startup. Both founders are liars; Holmes’ lies were dangerous, but of the two founders Neumann may have been more brazen. Theranos was a sham, but Bad Blood by Carreyrou describes it as a busy place where top-class scientists signed ironclad NDAs and strove to make Holmes’ lies come true in a toxic and stressful work environment. Neumann is 2000’s “hustle culture” personified: he is a hustler incarnate. The incredible thing about WeWork is that Neumann…
Cockroach by Ian McEwen
A quick twist on the Metamorphosis In a reverse twist on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a fairly ordinary and even likeable cockroach, wakes up in the body of Jim Sams, the British Prime Minister. This is an occasionally funny book that describes an attempt by the Cockroach wing of the party to enact an economic concept called Reversalism. Under the Reversalist paradigm, employees pay to work, but are paid for consuming. The book digs its heels into the dirty politics of cross-border transactions, and patriotic chest-thumping ensues. It’s all a bit heavy-handed, but it has the merit of being short.
Shackleton, By Endurance We Conquer by Michael Smith
I recently read “The Last Viking”, a biography of Roald Amundsen, the first man to traverse the Northwest passage, the first to reach the North Pole by airship (and possibly at all) and the first to reach the South Pole. It opened my eyes to the heroic age of polar exploration, a time when people straddling the line between sane and insane attempted feats that defied death and often defied logic. Shackleton did not achieve any enduring heroic “firsts”, and for years his reputation played second fiddle to that of the famous Captain Scott. Shackleton is now regarded as one…