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Hardcover
416 pages
ISBN 9780805082364 Published June 2009
Metropolitan Books
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Posted April 13, 2010 3:54 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Business narratives took home the Pulitzer Prize in two separate categories this year—Biograghy and History.
If you're interested in more business histories and biographies, check out Jack's recent review of Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West by Stephen Fried.
The Rubber Macondo.
Posted Feb. 9, 2010 3:02 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
In the early part of the last century, Henry Ford was one of the most influential and admired men in the world. He was an industrialist-philosopher, building a new, mechanized Eden in America. He hired men of every color, nation and religion and payed them an unheard-of five dollars a day to stand in one place at work and live a clean life at home (Ford had a Sociological Department that sent hundreds of agents into Dearborn and Detroit to investigate employee's lives and write up personnel reports). He had a benevolent supremacy over everything in his factories, from its workers to the natural resources they fished out of forests and mountainsides and fashioned into automobiles.
Ford's frustrations with domestic politics and culture were legion: war, unions, Wall Street, energy monopolies, Jews, modern dance, cow's milk, the Roosevelts, cigarettes, alcohol, and creeping government intervention ... churning beneath all these annoyances was the fact that the force of industrial capitalism that he helped unleash was undermining the world he hoped to restore.
Fordlandia was going to be Ford's solution to that laundry list of (by turns hilarious and disturbing) annoyances, and his vision of heaven on earth. Not to spoil the ending for you, but... it didn't work out.
There was the predictable grift and corruption to get the city started, an absurd attempt to clear the rain-forest by burning it down during the wet season (which didn't work, prompting the terrifying addition of kerosene to the picture), uncontrollable human disease once people began to arrive and, eventually, uncontrollable blight to the crop that Ford built the city to exploit—the rubber tree. The dream turned into a nightmare, "More Deadwood than Our Town" as Grandin describes it. The workers became dependent on the company and were exploited, were rebellious and were threatened, were subjugated and rioted. Greg Grandin does a meticulous job documenting these events (and Ford's thoughts, theories and life) in Fordlandia. And he brings the book to a satisfying conclusion by pulling back from the history of Ford's company town and taking a contemporary look at the situation in the Amazonian region its ruins inhabit. If you're a fan of biographies and narratives, this should be placed near the top of your reading list.
There is still hope that Detroit can turn itself around—that the auto industry that built the city can find a way out of its current morass. One bad decision by Toyota may end up having the effect that decades of mistakes by the American big three have had and bring about a Detroit Renaissance. Who knows? But Detroit's colony in the Amazon will forever be a ruin of a different era, of an industrial empire—that of Henry Ford.
Amazon's Best of 2009
Posted Dec. 4, 2009 6:11 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
Amazon does an interesting thing every year, putting their best selling books in each genre on the same page as their editors' pick so you can easily compare the two.
I am sure that, were I an author, I'd hope to see my name on the bestsellers list. It would mean that I had not only done well financially for the year but, more importantly, that my book had made it into the hands of more readers—my ideas into the minds of more people.
That said, as a reader I always look at the editors' list first. I don't know who Amazon's editors actually are—come to think of it, the only person I know works for Amazon is Jeff Bezos—but I'm guessing that, like us, they spend their days at work poring over the many books that come across their desks, and they've probably become pretty damn good at picking which ones they're going to take home and focus on. There are a lot of books every year that will never see the light of a bestsellers list—that will never catch the popular eye—that nonetheless contain provoking insights for thought leaders and have a greater long-term effect on our lives than a flash-in-the-pan bestseller.
Ideally, of course, you'd make both lists. Congratulations to Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the authors of Animal Spirits, George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, on that feat.
Here are the complete lists in Amazon's Business & Investing category for 2009:
The customer favorites:
- House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan, Doubleday
- The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide: Protect Your Savings, Boost Your Income, and Grow Wealthy Even in the Worst of Times by Martin D. Weiss, John Wiley & Sons
- Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods, Regnery Press
- Suze Orman's 2009 Action Plan: Keeping Your Money Safe & Sound by Suze Orman, Spiegel & Grau
- The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History by Harry S. Dent, Free Press
- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press
- Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press
- How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins, HarperCollins
- Strengths-Based: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Gallup Press
- I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi, Workman Publishing Company
The editors' list:
- The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox, HarperBusiness
- Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett, Free Press
- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press
- How Did That Happen?: Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way by Roger Connors & Tom Smith, Portfolio
- Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher, Penguin Press
- In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel, Crown Business
- Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith, John Wiley & Sons
- Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press
- SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Crown Business
- Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod, Portfolio
Other notable editors' picks are T.J. Stiles' The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt published by Penguin Press, winner of the NBA in nonfiction and put in the Biographies & Memoirs category by Amazon's editors, and Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, published by Metropolitan Books, which was the number one editors' pick in the History category.
Other customer favorites include Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed and The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough, both published by Penguin Press, and This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Kenneth S. Rogoff and Carmen M Reinhart and published by Princeton University Press. All of these were in the History category.
To delve into the lists more, head on over to Amazon's Best of 2009.
The First Tycoon: The Epic Winner of the NBA's Nonfiction Prize
Posted Nov. 19, 2009 5:34 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
- Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook by David M. Carroll, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean B. Carroll, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt - Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin, Metropolitan Books
- The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor, Princeton University Press
All of the finalists, in all categories, were interviewed for these awards, and The Believer's reviews editor, Meehan Crist, interviewed those in the nonfiction category. Here is a little taste of that interview:
MC: What questions drove you as you worked on The First Tycoon? In other words, what was it that you hoped to better understand by writing it?
TJS: My interest in both the individual life and the historical context drove my work on Commodore Vanderbilt (as he was known). I wanted to understand the mind and personality of someone who clawed his way from the bottom to the top. I was also interested in the effects of that personality, and those ambitions, on his family. And I tried to grasp what Vanderbilt’s career could tell us about the making of the modern United States in the broadest sense. How did he help to shape the American economy—our ideals of equality and opportunity—our arguments over the role of government, and our economic imagination? I began to see his career as part of a great transformation: the abstraction of economic reality, with the rise of paper currency, corporations, securities, and financial markets. This invisible architecture of commerce—which we live in today—troubled many Americans, who were accustomed to a tangible economy of precious metals, physical property, and human beings.
Head on over to the National Book Foundation Website to see the finalists and winners in the other categories and read more of the interview(s).
100 Best Makes ALA Top 10 List
Posted Oct. 2009 5:35 a.m. by jon
In 100 Best - 800 CEO Read Blog
Each year, the American Library Association compiles a list of business books that libraries around the country use for guidance on quality books to include in their stock. This year, they've included 8cr's Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten's The 100 Best Business Books of All Time in their list of ten recommended business books for libraries to carry.
Also included in the list are Michael Lewis', Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, Julia Angwin's, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America, and others, including something I'm personally interested in seeking out, Greg Grandin's, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City.
It's an honor for us to see this book, that compiled the best business books, find it's place in another such list, among fine company, and hopefully with the ability to reach an even wider range of people that can discover some of the greatest business thoughts ever put to paper.
