Category: Business

American Cartel

American Cartel by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz offers a gripping exposé of the opioid crisis, detailing how pharmaceutical companies fueled the epidemic. While the authors provide a compelling narrative of corporate greed and regulatory failure, the book occasionally veers into sensationalism. The focus on a small group of DEA agents and lawyers, though engaging, may oversimplify the complex web of factors contributing to the crisis.

Despite these shortcomings, the meticulous research and powerful storytelling make American Cartel a crucial read for understanding the human toll of the opioid epidemic and the ongoing fight for accountability in the pharmaceutical industry.

Elon Musk

Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk offers an intimate look into the life of the visionary entrepreneur. While chronicling Musk’s remarkable achievements in space exploration, electric vehicles, and sustainable energy, the book also unveils his mercurial personality and uncompromising leadership style. Isaacson portrays Musk as a driven “man-child” with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match, often dismissive of dissent and prone to volatile outbursts. The biography celebrates Musk’s relentless pursuit of innovation while hinting at the personal costs and interpersonal challenges that accompany his single-minded focus.

The Managerial Revolution

James Burnham’s 1941 book The Managerial Revolution argued that capitalism was being replaced by a new system of “managerialism” – rule by an elite class of administrators in business and government. While Burnham made some prescient observations about the growing power of managers, his specific predictions about the future did not fully materialize.

The book suffers from an overly deterministic view of history and an inability to account for the complexity of human behavior. However, The Managerial Revolution remains an influential work that foreshadowed important trends in the rise of the administrative state and the professional-managerial class.