3 Good Books

Jason & Lily reading a classic purchased by Mark and Janet when Lily was born.

So after finishing up my binge of Reign last January, I was in severe Mary Queen of Scotts withdrawal!  This caused me to start reading this famous biopic by Antonia Fraser.  It's actually a really good book but I still haven't been able to finish it because I am dreading the end... so silly because I know how it ends and yet still don't want to read the details.  I think I prefer the glossy CW version.

Instead of finishing Mary Queen of Scotts, I pivoted and read 3 books in quick succession - Squeezed: Why our Families Can't Afford America, When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company and an Epic Wall Street Battle, and Bad Blood:  Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.  Here's my brief take on each.

Squeezed

I really wanted to like this book but unfortunately, I can't recommend it.  Alissa Quart's premise rang true to me (that the insane cost of housing and medical care has kicked many middle class families down to working class, with no chance of upward mobility) but I didn't find her support for the premise to be compelling.  She spends way too much time talking about edge cases (surely adjunct professors can't be the best example of a vanishing middle class job) and her chapter about lawyers did not resonate with me.  It's true that the great recession severely impacted the legal profession and it still hasn't fully recovered.  But I think it's also true that anyone who went to law school thinking "This is going to be so easy.  I am going to graduate and swim in money with little to no effort" is fracking delusional.

When the Wolves Bite

I didn't even know that someone wrote a book about Herbalife, Ackman and Icahn until my friend Travis told me!  I immediately bought it and read it soooooo quickly.  It was a little surreal to read, having been there for some of the things written about, but I was impressed with its accuracy (at least from my perspective).  However, my bone to pick with this one is that Scott Wapner chose to focus on the dynamic between the titular billionaires instead of the consequences of their battle.  I could write my own book on those, but mainly I wish Wapner had written about the confusion, fear and anger that all of the rank and file employees (like Matt and I) felt.  We knew that Ackman's central premise was just dead wrong and yet our retirement funds via stock were disappearing before our eyes.  I don't think Wapner captured that and the book gave the impression that it was all monopoly money.

Bad Blood

This was the winner of the bunch, recommended to me by Jess.  It was an easy, fun read that left me wishing John Carreyrou wrote the book about Herbalife instead of Wapner!  I don't have any bones to pick with this one; just praise.  I thought I knew the story of Theranos' rise and fall until I read this book.  There are so many great details that were not in the various news articles.  I particularly enjoyed reading about David Boies' misguided use of NDAs and threatening letters to try to silence whistle-blowers.  For someone who's been on the right side of quite a few battles, he really picked the wrong one here.  But I guess the main reason why I enjoyed this book was that the villain actually got caught!  It took over a decade but finally the fraud collapsed and Elizabeth Holmes was exposed.  It makes me hopeful that in this age of Trump, where grifters and scammers are literally running our government, there will be similar consequences for them down the road.