Riverman: An American Odyssey

Riverman: An American Odyssey by Ben McGrath
Published by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group on April 5, 2022
Pages: 10
Format: audiobook
Genres: Nonfiction, Journalism
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Synopsis

The riveting story of Dick Conant, an American folk hero who, over the course of more than twenty years, canoed solo thousands of miles of American rivers--and then in 2014 disappeared near the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

For decades, Dick Conant paddled the rivers of America, covering thousands of miles along the Mississippi, Yellowstone, Ohio, Hudson, and innumerable smaller tributaries. These solo excursions were epic feats of planning, perseverance, and physical courage. At the same time, Conant collected people wherever he went, creating a vast network of friends and acquaintances who would forever remember this brilliant and charming man even after a single meeting.
Ben McGrath, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was one of those people. In 2014 he met Conant by chance just north of New York City as Conant paddled down the Hudson, headed for Florida. McGrath wrote a widely read article about their encounter, and when Conant's canoe washed up a few months later, without any sign of his body, McGrath set out to find the people whose lives Conant had touched--to capture a remarkable life lived far outside the staid confines of modern existence. Riverman is a moving portrait of a man who was as troubled as he was charismatic, who traveled alone but thrived on connection and brought countless people together in his wake. In the tradition of nonfiction classics like Great Plains and Blue Highways, it is also a portrait of an America we rarely see: a nation of unconventional characters, small river towns, and long-forgotten waterways.

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
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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.

Pure Land: A True Story of Three Lives, Three Cultures, and the Search for Heaven on Earth

Pure Land: A True Story of Three Lives, Three Cultures, and the Search for Heaven on Earth by Annette McGivney
Published by Aquarius Press on October 2, 2017
Pages: 354
Format: paperback
Genres: Domestic Politics, Japan, Journalism, Native American, United States
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Synopsis

Tomomi Hanamure, a Japanese citizen who loved exploring the wilderness of the American West, was killed on her birthday May 8, 2006. She was stabbed 29 times as she hiked to Havasu Falls on the Havasupai Indian Reservation at the bottom of Grand Canyon. Her killer was a distressed 18-year-old Havasupai youth. Pure Land is the story of this tragedy. But it is also the story of how McGivney’s quest to understand Hanamure’s life and death wound up guiding the author through her own life-threatening crisis. On this journey stretching from the southern tip of Japan to the bottom of Grand Canyon, and into the ugliest aspects of human behavior, Pure Land offers proof of the healing power of nature and the resiliency of the human spirit.

"There is such tragic irony here. The very things that Japanese tourist Tomomi Hanamure is so deeply passionate about--the wild, stark, beautiful American West and Native American culture--are what leads to her violent death. Around this single horrific event Annette McGivney has masterfully woven three separate, highly personal narratives."-- S. C. Gwynne, Author of Empire of the Summer Moon, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

"McGivney intuitively grounds her narrative while exploring humanity's roots of culture and origins of character, like the light of the sun awakening each intricate layer of earth in the deepest of canyons. She is a storyteller of the highest caliber, with a style reminiscent of Jon Krakauer's journalistic skill and unmistakable purpose."-- Carine McCandless, author of The Wild Truth, the New York Times bestselling follow-up to Into the Wild

"Annette McGivney has gathered three disparate narratives and braided them into a bewitching tapestry of darkness and light, pain and atonement, along with the unexpected gifts that can sometimes accompany profoundly devastating loss." -- Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

The Enemy of the People

The Enemy of the People by Jim Acosta
Published by HarperAudio on June 11, 2019
Genres: Domestic Politics, Journalism, Nonfiction, Political Ideologies
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Synopsis

A New York Times bestseller.

From CNN’s veteran Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta, an explosive, first-hand account of the dangers he faces reporting on the current White House while fighting on the front lines in President Trump’s war on truth.

In Mr. Trump’s campaign against what he calls “Fake News,” CNN Chief White House Correspondent, Jim Acosta, is public enemy number one. From the moment Mr. Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he has attacked the media, calling journalists “the enemy of the people.”

Acosta presents a damning examination of bureaucratic dysfunction, deception, and the unprecedented threat the rhetoric Mr. Trump is directing has on our democracy. When the leader of the free world incites hate and violence, Acosta doesn’t back down, and he urges his fellow citizens to do the same.

At Mr. Trump’s most hated network, CNN, Acosta offers a never-before-reported account of what it’s like to be the President’s most hated correspondent. Acosta goes head-to-head with the White House, even after Trump supporters have threatened his life with words as well as physical violence.

From the hazy denials and accusations meant to discredit the Mueller investigation, to the president’s scurrilous tweets, Jim Acosta is in the eye of the storm while reporting live to millions of people across the world. After spending hundreds of hours with the revolving door of White House personnel, Acosta paints portraits of the personalities of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Sean Spicer, Hope Hicks, Jared Kushner and more. Acosta is tenacious and unyielding in his public battle to preserve the First Amendment and #RealNews.