Books Read

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
Published by Alfred A. Knopf on May 21, 2018
Pages: 341
Format: ebook
Genres: High-Stakes Science, Medicine, Nonfiction
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Synopsis

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.

For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.

Who would have thought that a blonde haired, blue eyed nineteen-year-old drop out from Stanford University could have fooled so many, for so long? That is precisely what Elizabeth Holmes did when she incorporated her company Real-Time Cures, later renamed Theranos. By the end of 2004, Elizabeth had raised more than 6 million dollars. Before it all over Theranos had over 800 employees and a paper valuation of $9 billion. 

What happened at Theranos is a reflection of what is most common in our society today. A willingness to believe in something that can not possibly be true, a desire to follow an individual without rational thought or cause. How could someone deceive so many people for so long? What motivated Holmes to persist in this delusion? Holmes endangered thousands of lives by processing blood test without suffice blood samples. She has misled investors, terrorized employees and generally lied at every opportunity. 

This week Theranos was dissolved, it no longer exists, Elizabeth Holmes is facing criminal charges that could cost her 20 years in prison.

 

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

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One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse, Jeff Cummings
Published by Brilliance Audio on May 3, 2016
Format: audiobook
Genres: Domestic Politics, Nonfiction, Religion
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Synopsis

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of “Christian America” is nothing more than a myth—and a relatively recent one at that.

The assumption that America was, is, and always will be a Christian nation dates back no further than the 1930s, when a coalition of businessmen and religious leaders united in opposition to FDR’s New Deal. With the full support of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, these activists—the forerunners of the Religious Right—propelled religion into the public sphere. Church membership skyrocketed; Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the country’s official motto. For the first time, America became a thoroughly religious nation.

Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how the comingling of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics today.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

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The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

The Perfect Weapon: How the Cyber Arms Race Set the World Afire by David E. Sanger
Published by Penguin Random House on June 19, 2018
Pages: 384
Format: hardback
Genres: 21st Century U.S. History, Technology, World Politics
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Synopsis

From the premiere New York Times Washington correspondent, a stunning and incisive look into how cyberwarfare is influencing elections, threatening national security, and bringing us to the brink of global war.

Behind the Russian cyberattacks that may have thrown the 2016 election; behind the Sony hack; behind mysterious power outages around the world and the disappearance of thousands of personnel records from poorly guarded government servers are the traces of a new and powerful weapon, one that has the potential to remake global conflict like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. The Perfect Weapon is the riveting story of how, in less than a decade, cyberwarfare displaced terrorism and nuclear attacks as the greatest threat to American national security.

Cheap to acquire, difficult to defend against, and designed to shield their user's identities so as to complicate retaliation, these weapons are capable of an unprecedented range of offensive tactics; they can take us just short of war, allowing for everything from disruption to theft to the cause of widespread damage of essential infrastructure systems. And the vulnerability of those systems has created a related but equally urgent conflict: American companies like Apple and Cisco must claim allegiance to no government in the name of selling secure products around the globe yet the US intelligence agencies want the help of such companies in defending against future cyberattacks.

Reported and written with unprecedented access by New York Times chief Washington correspondent and bestselling author David Sanger, The Perfect Weapon takes readers inside war rooms and boardrooms, into the secret cyberdens of American and Chinese military, to give the deep-background story of the increasingly pitched battle between nations, their governments, their cyberwarriors, and their corporations.