The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich

This audio book was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library. It was 7 hours and 19 minutes long and was read by Mike Chamberlain.

Think of it as the long-awaited "Facebook Story". Ben Mezrich, the author of the fabulous "Bringing Down the House," has done an exhaustive job of researching Facebook's genesis, and has created a work that is enough of a dramatization to make it almost a novel. To be sure, Mark Zuckerberg, the youthful founder of Facebook, did NOT sign off on this. And I cannot say I am surprised.

The story begins with Zuckerberg, and his friend, Eduardo Saverin, trying to meet girls at Harvard, where they are both undergrads. Mark gets an idea to create a website that archives photos of all the girls at Harvard and pairs random pictures for users of the site to choose which is hotter. While the site is in it's experimental phase, some of his computer science friends pass the site around and it goes viral in a short time and nearly gets him kicked out of school for hacking school databases and stealing the picture files that he used. His notoriety alerts some other students who were working on a social networking site of their own, and they approach him to help with it. He agrees, but then leaves them high and dry to create his own site, which goes on to become Facebook.

This is morality tale about friendship and how money changes everything. You will find yourself taking sides in this book, and perhaps even changing sides by the end of it. The Facebook relationship status "It's Complicated" is a fitting description of what happened between Mark and Eduardo. I think Mark was a lousy friend, and Eduardo was a lousy business partner. It's your call to decide which you think is worse.

The reader sounded so much like my favorite, Scott Brick, that it bumped this fun, interesting story into 4 star territory.

A colossal Failure of Common Sense, by Lawrence G. McDonald

This audio book was obtained from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Public Library. It is subtitled, "The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers". It was 16 hours and 38 minutes long, and was narrated by Erik Davies.

If you want to be better informed about last year's economic collapse, this is a good place to start. Lawrence MacDonald tells his story of how he became a Wall Street trader, about his successes at Lehman Brothers, and about the people who worked there.

If you just want to know who to blame, there is plenty of it to go around. During the Clinton Administration the seeds of this collapse were sown by ideologues on the left who pushed the mortgage industry to give loans to poor people, and free marketeers on the right, who repealed the Glass-Steagal Act that allowed these bad mortgages to tie up money throughout the economy.

As a story, this is suspenseful and well-told. There are heroes, villains, and bystanders with feet of clay. And I have to admit that I think the author is one of the latter. I know that traders are not supposed to create panics because it is a form of market manipulation. But their inside knowledge of the disaster to come should have been at least leaked to the press, especially the sale of sub-prime loans to people who were encouraged to lie about their incomes.

This was a 4 star page turner.

Creating a World Without Poverty, by Muhammad Yunus

This audio book was narrated by Patrick Lawlor, and was 10 hours and 15 minutes long.

The title alone is enough to put you off. It sounds like the work of some dreamer, a Pollyanna who has obviously never worked with the poor. But I picked this out to listen to it because I was already familiar with the author, and with the Grameen Bank.

Muhammad Yunus, an ivory tower economist, went back to his home country, Bangladesh, to find out for himself why his nation was, as Henry Kissinger once called it, a basket case. He found people willing to work, but who could not get credit at regular banks, and were at the mercy of predatory money lenders. So, he started making loans from his own resources, and proved that the poor can be good customers, and that they could be transformed by opportunity.

That is Yunus before this book, which is largely about the concept of Social Business: businesses that exist to serve the poor, pay no dividends, and are self-perpetuating in a way that charities are not. He takes us step by step through is experiences with helping poor people and even beggars become self-employed, and even his daring joint venture with an international corporation.

This book is inspiring and instructive. It should be read by anyone who says they care about the poor. His remarkable results, which includes a 98% repayment rate, are part of a very wholistic approach to responsibility and accountability. My doubts start to nag me when I think about the poor in America, where the work ethic does not seem to be as strong as it is in Bangladesh. We have something as hard to overcome as floods and famine: apathy and a sense of entitlement and victimhood. In spite of my negative feelings, this book does make you start working them out and searching for solutions.

The last 2 disks of this 11 disk set were pretty counter productive, unfortunately, as Yunus begins to go political. He forgets that his work stands on the shoulders of the donors and investors who are a part fo the selfish capitalist system he has a bone to pick with.

This was well worth the time, and even the money to buy it if you have the chance. It's a 4 star read before the diatribes.

Higher, by Neal Bascomb

This audiobook was obtained for free from NetLibrary.com, was 11 hours and 10 minutes long, and was narrated by Richard M. Davidson.

The 1920s were the perfect time for egos, ambition, idealism, and innovation to thrive. And it was at the very apex of the Roaring 20s, just before the collapse of the stock market, that the modern skyscraper began to flower.

This story is about the men who designed, financed, and built the tallest buildings in the world at the dawn of the Great Depression. Walter Chrysler, the newly minted automobile magnate, was an engineering junkie who played an active roll in designing the Chrysler Building. The architect, William Van Alen, was a highly regarded designer who had acrimoniously split with his business partner, H. Craig Severance. Severance was now building a competing project at 40 Wall Street, and both men were determined to build the tallest building in the world.

This is a more interesting book for all the background on the creation of the technology that allowed buildings to go from the load-bearing masonry construction that limited height, to the steel-cage design, high speed elevators, and improved hydraulics that make it possible to both build and inhabit skyscrapers.

But it's the human story with its attendant drama that takes "Higher" to another level. All of the parties who were involved in these projects had come from humble beginnings, and these buildings were also intended to be monuments to ideas and hope; something that we would do well to grasp in our cynical age. This is a 4 star book.

Power Play, by Joseph Finder

This audiobook was obtained from Overdrive Audiobooks, through the website of the Alachua County Public Library. It was read by Dennis Boutsikaris, and was 8 hours and 30 minutes long, including an author interview.

Jake Landry is a lower level executive at an aircraft manufacturer. The company has recently gotten a new CEO, a woman, to clean up some sloppy business practices. Jake gets the call to come on one of those off-site team-building retreats where executives get to bond under rugged circumstances. He is the low man there, and he is not particularly ambitious. But he has a past that had to be expunged from his record when he turned 18.

As the opening night meeting is getting underway at the remote wilderness lodge, the entire executive team is captured by paramilitary types who are posing as errant hunters. Their goal is to force them to ransom themselves with a huge bank transfer, and they are willing to kill some of their hostages to make that point.

This story has excellent characters and a fast moving story that gets to the point without rushing things. It's a four star story.

Shadow Account, by Stephen Frey

This audiobook was gotten from the Alachua County Public Library, was on 10 CDs and was read by Ken Kliban.

Connor Ashby is a young investment banker, lounging in his apartment with his hot girlfriend when he checks his email. It appears to have been sent to him by mistake. It's from someone named "Rusty" who is panicking and telling his boss that their book-cooking plot is about to be uncovered. As he is contemplating the origin of this missive, hot girlfriend asks him to go out and get her something. When he comes back, his apartment has been trashed, the girl is dead, and there is an armed man with bad aim still inside. Connor escapes with only a minor wound, but when he gets back with the police, the apartment is in good order, the girlfriend is gone, and now it's about to get complicated.

This promising start loses its way when it becomes tangled with yet another complicated story that is populated with less interesting characters. This book was needlessly complex and the story too improbable. It's like the mad scientist who is leaving the hero to die as soon as the rats chew through the cheese-encrusted rope that holds back the net full of hungry fiddler crabs that are lusting for human flesh. There has to be a simpler way to get things done.

I give it 2 stars for at least keeping me from moving on to the next book.

Dark Genius of Wall Street, by Edward Renehan

This book was obtained for free from NetLibrary.com, was 14 hours and 50 minutes long, and narrated by George Wilson.

This great biography is about one of the players of America's Gilded Age, Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons.

I don't know if you can really get a grasp of American history without getting to know the players. Jay Gould was the most notorious stock manipulator of the 19th century, and one of the richest men in the world during his lifetime. He began as a teen-aged land surveyor who got stiffed by his employer. From there he began publishing the maps he was stuck with, then got into the hide tanning business. By the time he was in his early 30s he owned a railroad and was driving his competitor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crazy.

Unfortunately, he made a train wreck of his reputation in the stock market. The times were incredibly corrupt, and you had to be a dirtbag to keep from getting skinned. So he became the biggest dirtbag of them all. By the time he died, every paper could only speak ill of him.

Yet, this was a very humanizing look at a man who made a vast fortune bringing other millionaires to the point of nervous exhaustion. He was a devious competitor and a micro-managing CEO of every company he was involved in. He was brilliant, yet he was also a tragic figure who lamented, toward the end of his life, that he could give his children everything except a good name.

4 stars for this amazing trip back to Victorian Era America.

The Takeover, by Stephen Frey

This is the author's first novel, was written in 1995, and was 12 hours and 47 minutes long. The narrator was Paul Hecht.

One of the first things I picked up on was the awkwardness of a book written just before momentous changes. This book was pre-September, 11, pre-Internet, and pre-cell phone. Yes, someone has a "car phone" (remember those??), and the main character has a "Bloomberg terminal" at his apartment so he can work at home, but it seems pretty clunky when so much has happened to alter our lives in the past 12 years.

Aside from the bad luck of timing, this was a pretty sorry book anyway. The politics is too preachy, the characters are not very compelling, and there are some holes in the story that are not resolved. And the obviously Clintonesque Democratic President is an innocent man beset by evil Republican villains out to frame him. More bad luck.

There was also a romantic interest too many. It divided any emotional power that should have been focussed on just one relationship. It was confusing at times, and never very interesting. There was nothing to pull for.

In defense of the author, (as I give him 1 star for this one), "The Day Trader" (2002) was much, much better. It was a 4 star book. "The Takeover" was worth missing.