Jan van den Berg

j11g.com

Tag: review

  • Bad Blood – John Carreyrou

    Everything you read and hear about Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is true. It is an incredible — TRUE — story, told exceptionally well, about the lethal cocktail of greed, ambition and narcissism.

    Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup – John Carreyrou (2018) – 339 pages

    If this wasn’t non-fiction I would have dismissed parts of this book as contrived. We are used to Silicon Valley success stories, but reading about such a supposed success, which raised 900 million dollars at a 10 billion dollar valuation, and which manages to completely fool people such as George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and which, eventually, turned out to be one big decade long lie, is insane.

    But not only is the story in itself extraordinary, two other things make this book stand out.

    First, the investigation about how this book came to be is part of the story itself. Which makes for a riveting read.

    And secondly this book is a celebration of the freedom of the press. With the dazzling number of lawyers, lawsuits and NDA’s described in the book, I was sometimes worried it would be snatched from my hands as I was reading it. The pressure put on people NOT to reveal the truth was enormous. If people like Elizabeth Holmes and David Boies would have had their way, the world would look a lot different. So you get a real sense how these things can go the other way, and where we will never know the truth. But the truth has prevailed (this time) through the freedom of the press. Bad Blood gives hope!

    The Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson (my favorite biographer) is mentioned a few times as a (misplaced) inspiration to some of the main character’s actions. Let’s hope Bad Blood can be such an inspiration of how not to do things.

    Go read it.

  • Kierkegaard – Patrick Gardiner

    Kierkegaard – Patrick Gardiner (1988) – 154 pages

    In general, philosophy has a reputation of being hard to understand, and Kierkegaard certainly does nothing to lessen this reputation. He was largely misunderstood in his lifetime, but also very aware that he was ahead of his time. Maybe that’s why he was an enormously prolific writer. His works are often complex and paradoxical in tone and plentiful enough to ponder on its meaning for many lifetimes.

    This book has the almost ungrateful job of trying to give an introduction to this rebel amongst philosophers. No easy task. And the writer does not help himself by choosing overly complex phrasings for already complex matters. So this is not an easy read. And, being an introduction, I expected a different writing style.

    But I did enjoy the biographical background information about Kierkegaards’ life in the first chapters. After that, Gardiner picks out 4 seminal works to explore main Kierkegaard themes. He does so by offsetting these to other philosophers, especially Kant en Hegel. But without necessary background this can quickly get complicated. (I had to keep notes.) Nevertheless, I especially enjoyed the Abraham paradox as a thinking exercise, and this book also provides nice starting points on Kierkegaards’ thoughts on subjectivity, immorality, individualism and the leap of faith concept.