Staff Picks

I love reading about scams, history, and the history of scams, and I am pleased to report that this is simply the finest book about pyramid schemes that I have ever read. This book considers pyramid schemes within the full context of American business history, bringing the propulsive energy and weird details of a novel while remaining almost comprehensively informative and engaging. If you only read one book about pyramid schemes, ever, in your life, make it this one.

 

Publisher's description: 
A groundbreaking work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing, from the shadowy cabals at the top to the strivers at the bottom, whose deferred dreams churn a massive money-making scam that has remade American society. Multilevel marketing companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the ultimate business opportunity: the chance to be your own boss. In exchange for peddling their wares, they offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and-most precious of all-financial freedom. If, that is, you're willing to shell out for expensive products, recruit everyone you know to buy them, and make them recruit everyone they know to do the same-thus creating the "multiple levels" of multilevel marketing, or MLM. Despite overwhelming evidence that multilevel marketing causes most of its participants to lose their money, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes, the industry's dubious origins, inextricably tied to well-known ideological figures like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny. Behind the scenes of American life, MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, teachers, nurses-anyone who has been left behind by inequality. In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny post-war California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the suburbs of Michigan and North Carolina, where MLM bought its political protection, to the stadium-sized conventions where top sellers today preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has been endorsed by multiple American presidents, has its own Congressional caucus, and enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffet, and Donald Trump. Along the way, Read delves into the heartbreaking stories of those enmeshed in the majority-female industry: a veteran in Florida searching for healing; a young mom in Texas struggling to feed her children; a waitress scraping by in Brooklyn. A wild trip down an endless rabbit hole of greed and exploitation, Little Bosses Everywhere exposes multilevel marketing as American capitalism's stealthiest PR campaign: a cunning right-wing political project that has shaped nearly everything about how we live.

 

The author of Dopesick returns to the subject of the opioid epidemic and how the pharmacy industry and politicians alike play a role in this ongoing national tragedy. As New York Times reporter Jan Hoffman notes in her review, "Macy, no longer struggling with why, has moved on to an even more impenetrable question: How the hell do we extract ourselves from this quicksand?" Readers who were fascinated and outraged by Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe's chronicle of the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, will want to check out this new title, which Kirkus Reviews calls "A profoundly disconcerting book that, with luck, will inspire reform to aid the dopesick and punish their suppliers."

 

Publisher's Description:

Nearly a decade into the second wave of America's overdose crisis, pharmaceutical companies have yet to answer for the harms they created. As pending court battles against opioid makers, distributors, and retailers drag on, addiction rates have soared to record-breaking levels during the COVID pandemic, illustrating the critical need for leadership, urgency, and change. Meanwhile, there is scant consensus between law enforcement and medical leaders, nor an understanding of how to truly scale the programs that are out there, working at the ragged edge of capacity and actually saving lives. Distilling this massive, unprecedented national health crisis down to its character-driven emotional core as only she can, Beth Macy takes us into the country’s hardest hit places to witness the devastating personal costs that one-third of America's families are now being forced to shoulder. Here we meet the ordinary people fighting for the least of us with the fewest resources, from harm reductionists risking arrest to bring lifesaving care to the homeless and addicted to the activists and bereaved families pushing to hold Purdue and the Sackler family accountable. These heroes come from all walks of life; what they have in common is an up-close and personal understanding of addiction that refuses to stigmatize—and therefore abandon—people who use drugs, as big pharma execs and many politicians are all too ready to do. Like the treatment innovators she profiles, Beth Macy meets the opioid crisis where it is—not where we think it should be or wish it was. Bearing witness with clear eyes, intrepid curiosity, and unfailing empathy, she brings us the crucial next installment in the story of the defining disaster of our era, one that touches every single one of us, whether directly or indirectly. A complex story of public health, big pharma, dark money, politics, race, and class that is by turns harrowing and heartening, infuriating and inspiring, Raising Lazarus is a must-read for all Americans.

 

You've probably heard something about supply chains recently, but how much do you actually know about how our food gets to our shelves? This book made me realize that I actually knew very little! Sourcing food, pitching a product, designing labels, securing transportation, and storage space are all very important realities of the food supply chain. From learning the philosophies behind our favorite stores to shadowing industry professionals, Benjamin Lorr travels the world to witness the (sometimes horrific) market forces and human ingenuity that decide what we will be having for dinner.

 

Publisher's description: What does it take to run the American supermarket? How do products get to shelves? Who sets the price? And who suffers the consequences of increased convenience end efficiency? In this alarming exposé, Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry. Combining deep sourcing, immersive reporting, and compulsively readable prose, Lorr leads a wild investigation in which we learn: The secrets of Trader Joe's success from Trader Joe himself; Why truckers call their job "sharecropping on wheels"; What it takes for a product to earn certification labels like "organic" and "fair trade"; The struggles entrepreneurs face as they fight for shelf space, including essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business; The truth behind the alarming slave trade in the shrimp industry. The result is a page-turning portrait of an industry in flux, filled with the passion, ingenuity, and exploitation required to make this everyday miracle continue to function.

Excellent book about how to recognize high conflict versus healthy conflict. We need conflict to move forward but high conflict is dangerous and leads to extreme divisiveness. The author gives examples of high conflict situations and how people were able to extricate themselves from it. The most important tools include having curiosity about others, not making issues binary, acknowledging their complexity, and recognizing and avoiding 'fire starters' who use high conflict to their benefit.

 

Publisher's description: High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side. Author and journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict--and how they break free. People do escape high conflict. Individuals--even entire communities--can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.

 

This nonfiction psychology book by Daniel Kahneman outlines, better than anything I've ever read, the ways in which humans fool themselves and err when thinking. It's about how humans' two systems of thought--intuition and slow thinking--shape our judgment and decisions, and how we can effectively use both systems. Using principles of behavioral economics, Kahneman describes how we should think in order to avoid mistakes in situations when the stakes are high. Sometimes we think fast, and sometimes we think slow. This book is engaging and thought-provoking and I'd recommend it to anyone 13+. Or, I'd highly recommend the audiobook, narrated by Patrick Egan :) 

- Kylie, 10th grade teen volunteer

 

Publisher's description:

In this work the author, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, has brought together his many years of research and thinking in one book. He reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives, and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. This author's work has transformed cognitive psychology and launched the new fields of behavioral economics and happiness studies. In this book, he takes us on a tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think and the way we make choices.

It isn't always a pleasant endeavor, but it is essential to understand the harm that greed can unleash on so many. The Sackler family who wanted notoriety for all their philanthropic endeavors worked so hard to distance themselves from their involvement in the day to day activities of the company they owned, that made and distributed Oxycontin which resulted in such rampant opioid addictions. The three brothers, all medical doctors, who started the company at first had high ideals, but the book navigates all the ways from the beginning that the brothers worked the system from manufacturing to advertising to paying for political influence. It is a fascinating read and leads to so much understanding of the power of money on society, the disdain the family held for people who suffered from the opioid crisis, and the belief their philanthropic endeavors could whitewash everything. The heirs to the three brothers knew what their product would cause, how to market it, and how to buy political influence to protect themselves.

 

Publisher description:

Presents a portrait of three generations of the Sackler family (Arthur, Raymond, and Mortimer), who built their fortune on the sale of Valium and later sponsored the creation and marketing of one of the most commonly prescribed and addictive painkillers of the opioid crisis, OxyContin.

 

I'm not a huge nonfiction reader and I really never have been, but this book was an exception. It's a great book with a really important message, and every chapter brings a new story to the reader that explains in a bright and brilliant way how success doesn't occur in a vacuum. One story tells of the Canadian hockey league and the fascinating statistic that the vast majority of all successful hockey players are born in January, February or March. Why? Because the cutoff date for signing children is January 1, and those born in the first three months have a distinct advantage in age, experience and size in relation to those they play against. That same cutoff date is used by other countries, such as the Czech Republic, for not only hockey but soccer as well, which means that children born in the later part of the year consistently are overlooked when it comes to team sports. It's just one of the built-in biases around us that play a role in determining the success or failure of an individual. This book is significant, thought-provoking, and easy to read. If you enjoy the content or writing style of this book, I'd also recommend Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History.

 - Kylie, 10th grade teen volunteer

Technology, to sum up the author's point, is intrinsically neither good nor bad. The key is using it to support your goals and values, rather than letting it use you. The result is this little book, an excellent primer on the why and the how of becoming a digital minimalist, which means taking control of technologies--apps, notifications, social media--that right now probably have control of you. Fans of Newport's earlier book, Deep Work, will especially appreciate this work, but everyone should read it!

 

Publisher description:

A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today bestseller "Newport is making a bid to be the Marie Kondo of technology: someone with an actual plan for helping you realize the digital pursuits that do, and don't, bring value to your life."--Ezra Klein, Vox Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It's the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world. In this timely and enlightening book, the bestselling author of Deep Work introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives. Digital minimalists are all around us. They're the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. They can get lost in a good book, a woodworking project, or a leisurely morning run. They can have fun with friends and family without the obsessive urge to document the experience. They stay informed about the news of the day, but don't feel overwhelmed by it. They don't experience "fear of missing out" because they already know which activities provide them meaning and satisfaction. Now, Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement, and makes a persuasive case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world. Common sense tips, like turning off notifications, or occasional rituals like observing a digital sabbath, don't go far enough in helping us take back control of our technological lives, and attempts to unplug completely are complicated by the demands of family, friends and work. What we need instead is a thoughtful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions. Drawing on a diverse array of real-life examples, from Amish farmers to harried parents to Silicon Valley programmers, Newport identifies the common practices of digital minimalists and the ideas that underpin them. He shows how digital minimalists are rethinking their relationship to social media, rediscovering the pleasures of the offline world, and reconnecting with their inner selves through regular periods of solitude. He then shares strategies for integrating these practices into your life, starting with a thirty-day "digital declutter" process that has already helped thousands feel less overwhelmed and more in control. Technology is intrinsically neither good nor bad. The key is using it to support your goals and values, rather than letting it use you. This book shows the way.

 

An enthralling, baffling story of ambition and corruption, with no easy answers. Delve into the life and times of Theranos's charismatic founder, and follow her and the company from the beginning to the top of the world to the point where it all finally crumbles away.