the times | Saturday December 4 2021 saturday review 15
have lived through, the net result means
being broken by tiny catastrophes,” she
says. The good news is that the vast
majority of us will bounce back and
some of us will come out of this stronger.Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What
Matters Most by Greg McKeown
Virgin, £14.99
What if this could be easy? What if
instead of pushing ourselves to the limit,
we did the bare minimum? That’s what
this book invites us to consider, arguing
that our determination to go the
extra mile (then one more mile, and
another.. .) can mean we never reach the
finish line. With burnout rising sharply
in the wake of the pandemic, this is a
helpful, timely reminder to take it easy
in life and work. Here’s to an effortless
2022... or is that tempting fate?changing our minds all the time and that
“rethinking liberates us to do more than
update our knowledge and opinions —
it’s a tool for leading a more fulfilling
life”. In our polarised times, I cannot
think of anyone who would not
benefit from reading this book that
reminds us to have the humility to
admit we don’t know it all.No Cure for Being Human (And
Other Truths I Need to Hear)
by Kate Bowler Rider, £14.99
At the age of 35, Kate Bowler was
diagnosed with stage four colon cancer
and told it was unlikely she would live
more than two years. She is still with us
at the age of 41. She has no platitudes
about seizing the day or living in the
moment. It is a clear-eyed, beautifully
written account of coming to terms withdays — I was charmed by this plea for
us to cherish time alone. A reformed
“extreme extrovert” who struggled to
spend even an hour on her own,
Francesca Specter found herself living
alone in lockdown. This book charts
her learning, through interviews and
reading, about why we run away from
our thoughts, losing ourselves in screens
or busy calendars, and the rewards that
come from sitting quietly in a room
alone, even if only for ten minutes.
Think Again: The Power of Knowing
What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant
WH Allen, £20
We hold tight to our opinions because
they feel like part of our identity —
therefore the act of changing our mind
can feel like changing who we are. Think
Again makes the case that we should be
that fact that “so often the experiences
that define us are the ones we didn’t
pick”. As she puts it: “I must accept the
world as it is, or break against the truth
of it: my life is made of paper walls.
And so is everybody’s else’s.”How to Be Broken: The
Advantages of Falling Apart by
Dr Emma Kavanagh Ebook only:
Orion Spring, £2.99
If you are coming to the end of this
year feeling battered and bruised,
read this hugely consoling book.
Emma Kavanagh, a psychologist who
specialises in how people deal with the
aftermath of disasters, explains what the
stress of the pandemic has done to our
minds, and how it is normal to have poor
concentration, poor memory and low
mood. “When you live through what wepick”. A
world
of it:
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saccepting Cancer victim
Kate Bowler and familysnap election A fan
takes a selfie with Boris
Johnson at Sedgefield
after the Tories’ election
success in December 2019
The best
accounts
of political
power are
often written
by those
proximate
to those
who wield it
Tycoons, tyrants, techies — and tequila
Empire of Pain: The
Secret History of the
Sackler Dynasty by
Patrick Radden
Keefe
Picador, £20
The winner
of this year’s
Baillie Gifford
prize for
non-fiction, this is the
meticulously researched, gripping and
fury-inducing tale of the Sackler family,
whose firm Purdue Pharma created and
aggressively marketed the painkiller
OxyContin, which fuelled the American
opioid crisis. The Sacklers’ greed,
corruption and apparent indifference to
the suffering of its customers are shown
on page after page of this shocking book
by Patrick Radden Keefe, a writer for
The New Yorker. Read it and rage.The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and
Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin Bloomsbury, £25
Peter Thiel stands out in Silicon Valley
as a Trump-supporting billionaire who
has also had a front-row seat at some of
its biggest tech companies. Max Chafkin,
a Bloomberg reporter, chronicles the life
of the tech industry’s most important
venture capitalist, a fascinating yet odd
character who made prescient early bets
on PayPal, Facebook and SpaceX, but
who has also embraced Donald Trump
and some far-right causes and beliefs.
In this illuminating biography Chafkin
explains how Thiel has helped to shape
Silicon Valley, for better or worse.The Cult of We: WeWork and the
Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown
and Maureen Farrell Mudlark, £20
A fascinating account of how the boss of
WeWork, which rents out cool-looking
office space on short leases, convinced
everyone that he was the next SteveJobs. He wasn’t. Eliot Brown and
Maureen Farrell, two journalists at The
Wall Street Journal, recount this modern
tale of the emperor’s new clothes as
WeWork rapidly became the most
valued American private startup to that
point, despite the increasingly erratic
behaviour of its boss, Adam Neumann.
Drugs, tequila, private jets and a
worrying messiah complex are just about
allowed when your company is worth
$47 billion — but Brown and Farrell
show how it all fell apart in spectacular
fashion once the money ran out.Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology
Can Explain Business and Life by
Gillian Tett Random House Business, £20
From explaining how hiring an
anthropologist helped the food giant
Mars to boost its sales of dog food to
showing why KitKats are so popular
in Japan, this engaging book argues
why businesses should look to
anthropology if they want to succeed.
Gillian Tett, editor at large at the
Financial Times, explains how this
“oft ignored and sometimes derided
branch of social sciences” can help
companies to “see around corners
and spot what is hidden in plain sight”.
Tett was one of the few financial
journalists accurately to predict the
financial crisis and demonstrates how
her PhD in anthropology is a key reason
she has often been able to see what
others are missing.Newport’s book asks how we can change
this and focus in “the age of overload”.Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and
the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone Simon & Schuster, £20
A deep insight into how Jeff Bezos’s
determination, ideas and ruthlessness
transformed Amazon from an online
bookseller to one of the most important
companies on the planet. Brad Stone, a
Bloomberg journalist, is perhaps a little
too reverential, but if you want to feel
as if you’re in the room as Bezos turns
Amazon — and himself — into a
behemoth that has changed the world,
this is hard to beat.We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence
Agency for the People by Eliot Higgins
Bloomsbury, £20
A remarkable book by the Leicester-
based blogger Eliot Higgins, who
explains how he and other volunteers set
up the investigative journalism website
Bellingcat by simply realising that there
was a vast hinterland of online sources
surrounding any big news story that the
press and experts would miss. The
group’s motto of “Identify, Verify,
Amplify” has helped to inform the world
about Syria’s use of chemical weapons
and the Russian military shooting down
flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, and
reveal the names of the two Russian
agents behind the Salisbury poisonings
in 2018. At a time of concern about “fake
news”, this hopeful book shows that the
battle against “the counterfactual forces
warping society” is far from over.An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s
Battle for Domination by Sheera
Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Bridge Street, £20
Coming out just a few months before the
explosive revelations from the Facebook
whistleblower Frances Haugen, this
book shows how the biggest social media
company has relentlessly prioritised
growth over almost anything else.
Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, two
New York Times journalists, focus on the
past five years, when Facebook “lost its
way” and its top executives appeared to
look the other way as staff brought
up concerns (and potential fixes) about
privacy, elections and even a possible
genocide. What emerges is a picture
of breathtaking arrogance and
irresponsibility by Facebook’s leaders.This Is How They Tell Me the World
Ends: The Cyber Weapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth Bloomsbury, £14.99
A gripping account of the author’s
investigation into the international sale
of zero days — “the most secretive,
highly classified and invisible market on
earth”. Zero days are flaws in computer
software that have not yet been
discovered by the developers. They
can give anyone who has spotted them
a covert back door into the entire online
systems of companies and government
agencies; this makes them very, very
lucrative. Nicole Perlroth, a New York
Times journalist, reveals how zero
days are the “blood diamonds of the
security trade”, pursued not just by
cybercriminals but also by government
spooks and defence contractors.A World Without Email: Reimagining
Work in the Age of Overload by Cal
Newport Portfolio Penguin, £14.99
A book for those who feel racked with
guilt and anxiety about their overflowing
inboxes (including this reporter, who has
more than 165,000 unopened emails), Cal
Newport explains why this modern way
of working needs a rethink. A professor
of computer science, he argues that the
constant flow of emails has created for
most people a “hyperactive hive mind” in
which we are checking messages every
six minutes, never fully concentrating
on the task at hand and ending up
exhausted. Practical and interesting,no sign of flagging The Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg celebrates July 4Tom Knowles on what
makes a top company
tick — and what makes
a bad one go bust
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