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.

Superfreakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner

This audiobook was obtained (as usual) from Overdrive Audio through the Alachua County Library. It was read by one of the authors, Stephen J. Dubner, and was 7 hours and 28 minutes long.

Economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner have struck again with another provocative look at incentives in the human marketplace. People either love or hate these books, or maybe just parts of them. Either way, Superfreakonomics is thought provoking and informative, even if you have problems with some of the information.

Perhaps the most controversial part, and a timely controversy it is, is the last chapter. It is about alternative solutions to Global Warming. The ideas presented are intriguing and liable to cause some heated arguments, but I consider that a good thing.

As a bonus, I would like to make this mp3 download available. Click here. It's an interview with Stephen Dubner, conducted by Michael Medved.

This is a fun read, and will fly by as it is quite entertaining. I give it 4 stars.

The Google Story, by David A. Vise

This audio book was 10 hours and 26 minutes long, produced in Windows Media format, and was narrated by Stephen Hoye.

This is the story of how two Stanford University PhD students created the word's most popular and successful search engine, Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford, and started to purchase all the cheap computers they could in an attempt to download the entire internet in their quest to create better search results.

This story covers their rise from students to startups to billionaires. There are details of their misadventures as a company with the motto: "Don't be evil". They have been criticized for mining personal data to improve their delivery of advertising as well as gathering information that could be abused by over reaching government authorities. Most troubling, in my estimation, was one of the founders' musings about the day when we might have the internet available to our brains on a microchip, making all the world's knowledge accessible at will.

A must read for anyone who wants to be hip to the world's most ubiquitous company. I give it 4 stars.

Charlie Wilson's War, by George Crile

This audiobook was 20 hours and 27 minutes long, and was narrated by Christopher Lane.

I never saw the movie, so I have no idea how the book and the movie are different. I always trust the book.

This is the story of how a Democrat Congressman from Texas took up the cause of the Afghan people after discovering how the army of the Soviet Union was wiping out all resistance to their invasion. As a member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, he was able to move millions, and eventually, billions of dollars to aid the Afghan insurgents who were still fighting with WW1 Enfield Rifles against helicopter gunships and tanks.

Charlie Wilson was a liberal who voted for civil rights, abortion rights, and all manner of liberal causes, but who was also a rabid anti-communist who wanted America avenged for the Viet Nam War. The Soviets had helped the Vietnamese insurgents bleed America dry, and he wanted to give it right back to them through proxies in Afghanistan.

This is a very instructive tale about how politics actually works at the Federal level, showing how unholy alliances really work. Relationships really do seem to trump ideologies, as Charlie Wilson becomes friends with Fundamentalist Muslim leaders who look the other way at his womanizing, boozing lifestyle while he bankroles their Jihads. In Congress, those who want to fight communists in Central America with Iranian money are prosecuted while American taxpayer dollars are matched by Saudi contibutions to fight communists on the other side of the world with the blessing of the same Congress. It seems that if a liberal want so run a secret war, it's OK. But if conservatives want to do it, it's unconscienable.

Political skill transcends morality even as American politicians convince themselves that they are doing the right thing to fund a primiative militia that has no limits on the atrocities they are willing to perform on captured Soviet soldiers. Eventually, these same Afghan militias will come back to haunt us in ways the Latin American Contras never did.

This is a must read for anyone who cannot understand the holes in the news. 4 stars!

The Four Hour Work Week, by Timothy Ferris

I actually listened to this audiobook twice. Although Mr. Ferris has some very revolutionary views on working and Lyfestyle Design, there are a lot of important nuggets scattered throughout for anyone who is even wondering about making money online.

Tim Ferris loves extreme living. He's a kick boxing champion, internationally competitive tango dancer, and runs his business from all over the world during his many mini-retirements. In today's global economy, with our modern mobile technology, and a free-wheeling imagination, there are few limits on what you can do. But first you must dare to do it.

In this book, Tim uses his own experiences, and those of his friends who are also members of The New Rich, to show you how to gradually free yourself from the static workplace so you can use your time more effectively for your own gain.

I give it 4 stars.