Volume 1, Issue 6: Energy, Chameleons, and Brass Tacks
We’re back!
It’s been 2 months since our last one. Hopefully you are ready for some new books to read and forgive us for being a bit slow at the end of the summer. I’m excited for the diversity of books we have for you in this issue. We are ranging from business books, dry history books (which I think are thrilling!), engaging short stories, and sobering fictions that resonate with reality. I’m very excited that we have Valerie back for another review, she is a prolific reader and always picks great ones to share with us.
A couple small updates:
1. I’m trying out a new way of hosting the blog, shifting it over to Medium where it is super easy to spin up a post and format. Hopefully you guys like it.
2. We won’t be copying the content into the email, instead encouraging you to go on to the site to read it. Hopefully the content displays better, it’s more engaging, and we get some of you to leave comments with your agreements, disagreements, and suggestions for new books!
Here is the list of books for this issue:
1. The Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
2. Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote
3. Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes
4. Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
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See you on the next page turn
- Max
The Gist: This was Capote’s last work (1980) before his untimely death. Most know him for In Cold Blood or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He is well known for his first person narrative, in the role as himself the journalist, giving the reader the view into a true story that is often not about him. But this unique nonfiction fiction, as he calls it, is inevitably about him. In Chameleons, Capote gathers a handful of short stories that span decades of his life. He covers moments from his childhood in New Orleans where he entrusts a ‘healer’ (and a pariah) with a deeply personal secret. He takes us to the house of an old gentle woman when he gets lost after his car breaks down. He takes you through a story about a riveting murder mystery in a small midwestern town where all those who were targeted would receive handcarved coffins before they were killed. He tells a story of him writing a piece about an immigrant cleaner in NYC and the time they got high. He brings you into an intimate day of eccentricity with his friend Marilyn Monroe. He then ends with a creative interrogation of himself, bringing you close to how the man thinks about life.
My Take: I loved this book of stories. I don’t tend to pick up short stories, but this came recommended by a friend of mine and I couldn’t be happier that I went for it. The stories are all beautifully written, they capture the purest of creativity blended with reality, and they give you a window into an astonishingly interesting and complicated life. If you don’t like a story, you’ll be done with it in a few pages. If you love a story, you’ll be sorry if was over so quickly. But this was Capote’s final bow, and it was one hell of a bow. Read it, enjoy it. And if you were fascinated by this peculiar man as I was, skim this interview he did with Playboy Magazine in 1968.
— Max
The Gist: This management book is written by Ben Horowitz, the Horowitz in Andreessen Horowitz, a famous VC company. They were investors in Facebook, Instagram, Box, Slack, etc… Horowitz also started his own company and sold it in 2007 for $1.6 billion. He wrote the book in 2014, and he breaks down the less obvious components of building a successful business. He starts the book with an overview of his pre-Andreessen Horowitz career, going through each stage of the mercurial days at Loudcloud (sold as Opsware). He then spends ⅔ of the book focusing on how to execute decisions, strategies, conversations as a senior leader in a company. He touches on hiring top talent, firing top talent, explaining tough decisions to your team, managing people, setting up a culture, giving/receiving feedback, etc… He positions this book on being less about theory and more about action.
My Take: His credentials are irrefutable. He has a lot of experience building companies and helping others build companies. Andreessen and him also came up with an intelligent network model to their VC, focusing on providing the right networks and skill sets to support the growth of young, promising companies. I also think that he makes a lot of interesting points on the topics he covers. I found his insights useful on many different fronts around fostering others professional growth, hearing our employees’ concerns, and so on. But I have to say, there are a ton of unlikable parts of this book. The first 70 pages were unbearable for me. It was a story of what seemed to be a very un-self aware man saying he was self aware. He makes off color jokes, his decision to use lyrics at the beginning of every chapter is odd, and his writing style is uninspiring. He comes off as a guy who wasn’t a very appealing character in the workplace, and his relentless focus on money at all costs is a sobering proposition. You can still be a successful capitalist without being him. His advice, although strong in many respects, holds very little rigor outside the fact that it worked for him. The leaps he makes between his thought process and his advice seems tenuous at best. As you can see by my own see-sawing about this book, it really is a bit of a paradox. But to sum it up, if you are managing, leading, or keen to do so, I see no harm in reading this book. You will definitely walk away with some good nuggets or information. My recommendation would be to read the last three pages (‘Final Lesson’ section) first, skip the first 60 pages, and the dive into his advice.
— Max
The Gist: Jende, his wife Neni, and their young son are Cameroonian immigrants living in Harlem. The book opens at Jende’s job interview for the position of chauffeur for Clark, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. The year is 2007, so the reader carries a sense of dread right from the beginning, made all the more poignant by Jende’s ignorance of Wall Street and his earnest hope of achieving the American Dream. On top of her labor at home as a dutiful wife and mother, and as a student at a community college where she is working toward her dream of becoming a pharmacist, Neni goes to work part-time for Cindy, Clark’s wife. There Neni forms a relationship with Clark and Cindy’s younger son, as his caretaker. Clark and Cindy’s older son tries to convince Jende that the American Dream is a scam, before dropping out of college to spiritually seek in India — confounding all four adults. As the inevitable financial crash rocks Wall Street, tensions between the four adults continue to rise to a breaking point, as their marriages, finances, and plans are shaken. We find out what they are willing to do to get what they want; and what happens if they can’t achieve their dreams.
My Take: Many novels attempt to address big issues, but only a few do so smoothly and organically. Behold the Dreamers is one of these successful books. Mbue uses the story of the two families — but really, the two couples — to present a nuanced exploration of addiction, marriage, immigration, class, race, and the American Dream. The story is told from Jende and Neni’s perspectives, but each character is complex and considered. I found this novel so successful because no character is “good” or “bad” — rather, they each do things you hate, but you can understand why they do what they do, and you still care about them. Although the book is set a decade ago, these issues are still causing crisis today, and the book feels extremely relevant.
— Valerie
The Gist: Rhodes tells the history of energy from pre-to-post industrial era, taking the reader through each major source of energy: wood, coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, and renewables. The book spans 5 centuries of energy usage, with a major focus on energy production and consumption in Britain, which is where the industrial revolution began. The book is thorough, and detailed, spanning the rise and fall of each source of energy and it covers the gradual developments and innovations that allowed each source to become the major energy production of that day. Rhodes spends the time to cover every angle of what it takes for energy to scale: discovery of natural resource, advancement of mechanics to build machines to produce energy, the physical infrastructure to support machines (i.e. rails for trains, roads for cars), cost of production, and societal adoption. The majority of the book is focused on these scientific and societal progressions, objectively detailing how our energy demands were met. However, in the last 80–100 pages, he switches to talk about feasibility and sustainability of different energy sources. His commentary on nuclear power is provocative, yet grounded in solid scientific research. He ends with his belief on what we must do to progress with a balance of renewable and nuclear.
My Take: I picked up this book because I felt ill-equipped and undereducated on the science behind our energy consumption. I conceptually understood that we were killing our planet, and felt strongly that we must change. But in order to do so, I knew I needed to understand the basics of how we discover, extract, produce, and consume energy. Rhodes’ book was a real eye-opener for me. Mostly, because this was not a book for beginners, which I was often reminded of how far I must come to really get ‘it’ (aka energy, climate change, chemistry). Rhodes goes deep into the mechanics of the steam engine, electricity, oil extraction, etc… I found myself googling, you-tubing every dozen pages or so in order to stay on top of his references and his descriptions, which require you either listened and retained everything from high school physics & chemistry, or you work in this field, or you are less naive than me. Any which way, this book is dense. It is tough to get through quickly. But this book brought me out of my comfort zone, educated me deeply, and has helped me on the right path to understanding the human and environmental roles in our use of energy. If you can make it through, it is a gratifying journey.
Bonus: I thought I’d share a little bit of what I learned. This wasn’t directly from the book as the book focused on the development of energy sources. But this is the type of knowledge that I needed to be a better consumer of his book, and hopefully you find it useful, too. The energy from the sun is absorbed in plants through the chemical process of photosynthesis, which turns light energy into chemical energy. The plant stores carbohydrates (hyrdocarbons) and releases oxygen. As plants die, these hydrocarbons fossilize with the plant in the soil. The layers of the earth are essentially different forms and phases of carbonization. Where do we get coal, oil and gas from? The different layers of the earth (hence fossil fuels)… With the exception of nuclear, all of our energy sources are versions of these hydrocarbons that get trapped in the earth. When we burn them, they interact with the oxygen in the air to produce new chemical forms: carbon dioxide, h2o, and heat energy. The part we use to generate energy for cars, trains, manufacturing plants, etc… is the heat energy (steam/pressure) which drives a piston or a mechanical part to create movement. The rest, the C02 and H20, release into the air. The more complex the hydrocarbon (aka the more carbon molecules in needs to break down) the greater the release of C02.
Many of you may have understood this cycle better than me, but if people found that snippet interesting, I’m thinking about doing a longer form article on my journey to understanding energy, our uses, and what we can do to produce and consume smarter. Let me know.
— Max
