audiobook

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

Filed Under: Books Read

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
Published by Hachette Audio on September 10, 2019
Format: audiobook
Genres: Nonfiction, Politics & Social Sciences
See it @ Goodreads

Synopsis

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers---and why they often go wrong.

How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn't true?

Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland---throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

Filed Under: Books Read

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow
Published by Hachette Audio on October 15, 2019
Format: audiobook
Genres: Domestic Politics, Nonfiction, Politics & Social Sciences
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

10 hours, 43 minutes

In a dramatic account of violence and espionage, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow exposes serial abusers and a cabal of powerful interests hellbent on covering up the truth, at any cost.

In 2017, a routine network television investigation led Ronan Farrow to a story only whispered about: one of Hollywood's most powerful producers was a predator, protected by fear, wealth, and a conspiracy of silence. As Farrow drew closer to the truth, shadowy operatives, from high-priced lawyers to elite war-hardened spies, mounted a secret campaign of intimidation, threatening his career, following his every move, and weaponizing an account of abuse in his own family.

All the while, Farrow and his producer faced a degree of resistance that could not be explained--until now. And a trail of clues revealed corruption and cover-ups from Hollywood, to Washington, and beyond.

This is the untold story of the exotic tactics of surveillance and intimidation deployed by wealthy and connected men to threaten journalists, evade accountability, and silence victims of abuse--and it's the story of the women who risked everything to expose the truth and spark a global movement.

Both a spy thriller and a meticulous work of investigative journalism, Catch and Kill breaks devastating new stories about the rampant abuse of power--and sheds far-reaching light on investigations that shook the culture.

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America

Filed Under: Books Read

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America by Christopher Leonard
Published by Simon & Schuster Audio on August 13, 2019
Format: audiobook
Genres: corporate oligarchs, Journalism, Nonfiction
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2019 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

“Superb…Among the best books ever written about an American corporation.” —Bryan Burrough, The New York Times Book Review

Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.

The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and US Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way.

For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates.

But there’s another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.

Seven years in the making, Kochland “is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections, and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard’s work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time” (Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Private Empire).

I would have never sat down and read this book. It is definitely something that you listen to while doing something else. That said.

I am of the firm conviction that you do not become wealthy by being an honest person. Kochland proves this through and through. Koch, modern-day robber baron, has little or no regard for society other than to have it function to his advantage. I was mainly put off by the Koch handling of the drivers in the Georgia Pacific warehouse; I found that inhuman.
I thought the author fairly even-handed in the portrayal of the Koch’s. I do not understand the mentality that people like Koch have, such an overbearing need to force their particular view upon the world. I am convinced that Koch Industries, like Mobil/Exxon, are evil.