A Tale of Bloody Faith, A multifaceted, terrifying tale of polygamy, horrific bloodshed, messianic hallucination, and unwavering faith. This is classic Krakauer, an absolutely engrossing nonfiction piece that sheds light on a typically perplexing area of human behavior. About 40,000 Mormon Fundamentalists live in remote enclaves in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, and Krakauer brings readers there. They hold the opinion that the mainstream Mormon Church erred horribly when it rejected polygamy. The leaders of these renegade cults are extremists who serve only God, defying both civil authorities and the Salt Lake City Mormon hierarchy.
Fundamentalist prophets exercise complete control over the lives of their followers by marrying copiously and with near impunity (the head of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five “plural wives,” some of whom were married to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties). They also preach that the world will soon be completely destroyed in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.
In his exploration of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren’s tale and the violent history of Mormonism, Krakauer uncovers a uniquely American form of religious extremism while probing the dark underbelly of the most prosperous indigenous religion in the country. The end product is classic Krakauer: a completely captivating nonfiction piece that sheds light on an often perplexing area of human behavior.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Common sense is no match for the voice of God.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
“As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than religion.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
“But some things are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
“Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
“Neither Emma’s tears nor her rage were enough to make Joseph monogamous, however; nor were the prevailing mores of the day. He kept falling rapturously in love with women not his wife. And because that rapture was so wholly consuming, and felt so good, it struck him as impossible that God might possibly frown on such a thing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
The award-winning journalist who broke the story first and persisted in following it to its conclusion despite pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers provides holmes had been deceiving her own staff, FDA officials, and investors for many years. Both Carreyrou and The Wall Street Journal were threatened with legal action when Carreyrou began to inquire after receiving a tip from a former Theranos employee. Unfazed, the publication in late 2015 published the first of dozens of Theranos articles. The company had no value at the beginning of 2017, and Holmes was threatened with legal action from the government and her investors. Here is the chilling account of the largest corporate deception since Enron, a sobering cautionary tale set amidst Silicon Valley’s grandiose declarations and gold-rush excitement. a complete inside account of the multibillion-dollar startup’s astonishing rise and catastrophic demise.
A brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” claimed to transform the medical profession with a device that would make blood tests substantially faster and easier, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was generally regarded in 2014 as the female Steve Jobs: With the support of financiers like Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos raised money by selling shares in a fundraising round, valuing the business at $9 billion. This placed Holmes’s net worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was only one issue: the technology wasn’t functional.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“By positioning Theranos as a tech company in the heart of the Valley, Holmes channeled this fake-it-until-you-make-it culture, and she went to extreme lengths to hide the fakery.”
“Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief.”
“Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry.”
“When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.”
“No, Dad, I’m not interested in getting a Ph.D., I want to make money.”
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson gives the unbelievable events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair such drama that readers may discover themselves checking the book’s classification to make sure it isn’t actually a highly imaginative novel. Larson presents the tales of two men: H.H. Holmes, a serial killer who pretended to be a charming doctor, and Daniel H. Burnham, the architect who designed the fair.
Burnham faced a formidable obstacle. He was compelled to overcome his partner’s passing and a number of other challenges in a short amount of time in order to build the renowned “White City” around which the show was created.
Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony, Buffalo Bill Cody, and other prominent figures make entertaining appearances as he describes their struggles to complete the project and the fair’s extraordinary success. The evil Dr. Holmes activities, who is thought to be accountable for a number of killings at the fair, are similarly extraordinary. He designed and built the World’s Fair Hotel beside the fairgrounds, complete with cremation and a gas chamber, and utilized the occasion and his own magnetic personality to entice victims.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.”
“I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.”
“I was born with the devil in me,’ [Holmes] wrote. ‘I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”
“His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.”
“Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.”
A shocking, sobering account of a marriage and an attempted murder that reveals the reality behind a case that made international headlines. Experienced skydiver Victoria Cilliers made a parachute jump on Easter Sunday 2015 as a gift from her husband, British army sergeant Emile Cilliers. She fell 4,000 feet to the ground after her parachutes failed to deploy, suffering injuries that may have been fatal. She somehow made it through. The police then knocked on her house. Emile was accused of having tampered with her parachute.
In I Survived, Victoria explains how she fell in love with Emile and how the sweet man she thought she understood over time exhibited a darker side, eroding her self-worth to the point where she could no longer distinguish between the truth and falsehoods.
She has two small children, so can she honestly think that her husband, who attempted to kill her? She attempts to come to terms with her past as new stunning truths emerge, she must deal with his trial, and she is subjected to nonstop media attention. Emile is unable to let her go, so even a guilty conviction does not set her free. ‘I Survived’ is a moving and honest account of a woman who through horror but still had the fortitude to create a new life for her family.
Anna Delvey, a self-described German heiress and Rachel DeLoache Williams’s new acquaintance, was cosmopolitan and aspirational. She was also kind, paying for opulent dinners at Le Coucou, infrared sauna sessions at HigherDOSE, drinks at the bar at the 11 Howard Library, and routine workouts with a famous personal trainer.
Rachel leaped at the opportunity when Anna suggested an all-expenses-paid trip to Marrakech at the five-star La Mamounia hotel. But the ideal trip abruptly turned gloomy when Anna’s credit cards inexplicably stopped functioning. Anna urged Rachel to start covering expenses, starting with their $7,500 per night luxury villa and then on to meals, shopping, and flights. Before Rachel realized it, her credit cards had been used to make charges totaling more than $62,000. When they reached New York, Anna promised she would pay Rachel back.
The refund never arrived back in Manhattan, and a startling pattern of dishonesty soon became apparent. Wherever Anna went, she left a trail of lies—and unpaid bills, as Rachel later discovered. Infuriated, Rachel phoned the district attorney, and in an amazing turn of events, she found herself assisting in the prosecution of one of the most infamous con artists in the city.
My Friend Anna is a riveting real story of “glamour, greed, hunger for power,” (The New York Times) and female friendship, told with rapid speed and in-depth reporting from the lady who actually lived it.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“This comment did not land as I expected. “It was totally boring,” she said dismissively.”
“The closer I got to the truth about Anna, the further I got from relief. The police weren’t interested in my black binder. I was still out $62,109.29, and American Express kept calling.”
“Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right.”
“In times of trauma, life unfolds in a chiaroscuro of peaks and valleys. You feel the highs and lows with amplified intensity.”
“Not long after that, HBO optioned my article for a potential film or television adaptation, and Netflix optioned Pressler’s article for the same.”
The amazing real account of a man who, working out of his bedroom, created a billion-dollar online drug empire. The Silk Road, a secret Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anybody may trade anything—drugs, hacking software, false passports, counterfeit money, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye, was established in 2011 by 26-year-old libertarian programmer Ross Ulbricht.
It didn’t take long for the media to learn about the new website where anyone could buy and sell contraband without being detected, including terrorists and black hat hackers in addition to kids and marijuana sellers. An epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive owner was begun by the federal government after a public outcry, but there were no leads, no witnesses, and no established jurisdictions. The only thing the detectives were certain of was that the site’s administrator went by the name of the Dread Pirate Roberts.
As The Silk Road swiftly grew to become a $1.2 billion business, Ross accepted his new position as kingpin. He assembled a devoted band of supporters in both high and low places, all of whom were as fixated on the excitement and danger of operating an illicit market as his clients were on the heroin they sold. He learned about the target on his back through his network and immediately took severe measures to defend himself, including arranging a hit on a former employee. Feds raced against time to find Ross as he made plans to vanish forever while scouring the world’s Internet for a man they weren’t even sure existed.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Over time he learned that the way to have a leg up on everyone else was to anticipate something before it happened and then have the answer to it.”
“Even though all these people were dealing in illicit activities, they each had a moral sense that their particular outlawed product was more just than another.”
“Tarbell had once played a joke using another agent’s car, hooking the car’s horn up to its brake pedal so every time the agent tried to slow down on his drive home, his horn blared at the cars in front of him.”
“This is one of those rare government buildings in which someone who uses a calculator for a living can wield more power than a person who carries a gun.”
“It was time to bring in the people with the calculators.”
Although there were other books written about Watergate, only All the President’s Men provided readers with the complete narrative, with all the drama, complexity, and exclusive reporting. And even now, thirty years later, if you only read one book about Watergate, make it that one. Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, senior writers for Fortune, are the new Woodward and Bernstein since Enron is currently the largest corporate story of our time.
Surprisingly, Enron was seen as the perfect example of a New Economy business just two years ago due to its rapidly rising profits and stock price. But it was prior to McLean’s story, which was published in Fortune and posed the seemingly harmless question, “How exactly does Enron make money?” The house of cards that was Enron started to fall apart after that. In order to provide a definitive book about the Enron crisis and the fascinating characters behind it, McLean and Elkind have now conducted a much deeper investigation.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Never, ever do the easy wrong instead of the harder right.”
“He once gave a speech advising anyone who wanted to complete a power project to “get all the lawyers in one room, then shoot ’em—in the mouth, because it’s impossible to miss.”
“Securitizations exploded, with everything from lotto winnings to proceeds from tobacco lawsuits being turned into securities that could be sold to the investing public.”
“I don’t like shorts promoting their position.”
“unmistakable message to boardrooms across the country: You can’t lie to shareholders. You can’t put yourself in front of your employees’ interests. No matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to play by the rules.”
Malcolm Gladwell guides us intellectually through the world of “outliers”—the smartest and most accomplished people—in this breathtaking book. What differentiates exceptional achievers, he wonders?
His response is that we focus too much on what successful individuals are like and not enough on where they come from, which includes their culture, family, generation, and unique experiences growing up. Along the way, he explains how software billionaires get their money, what it needs to be a good soccer player, why Asians are brilliant at math, and why the Beatles are the best music band ever. Outliers is a remarkable work that is both brilliant and amusing and will delight and enlighten.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
“Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.”
“Achievement is talent plus preparation”
“In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
“Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.”
You can pursue the job you want and succeed in getting it. You can make improvements to the job you now have! Any circumstance you find yourself in can be made to work in your favor. More than 15 million copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People have been sold since its 1936 publication. The first book by Dale Carnegie is a classic bestseller that has helped thousands of now-famous people climb the success ladder in both their personal and professional life. It is jam-packed with sound advice.
Dale Carnegie’s teachings are still applicable today and will aid you in realizing your full potential in the challenging and competitive modern world. Learn the six ways to win people around to your point of view, the twelve ways to convert people, and the nine ways to influence people without offending them.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”
“Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.”
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
“Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”
“Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.”
The first time Tara Westover entered a classroom, she was 17 years old. She was raised by survivalists in the highlands of Idaho, where she stocked up on home-canned peaches and slept with her “head-for-the-hills bag” in case the world ended. She salvaged in her father’s junkyard in the winter and boiled herbs for her mother, a midwife, and healer, in the summer.
Tara has never seen a doctor or nurse because her father forbids going to hospitals. Herbalism was used to heal burns from explosions as well as gashings and concussions at home. The family was so cut off from society that no one was there to make sure the kids went to school or to step in when Tara’s older brother started acting violently. After that, Tara started to educate herself despite having no official schooling. She taught herself the necessary algebra and language to get into Brigham Young University, where she studied history and discovered crucial global events like the Holocaust and the civil rights struggle for the first time. She had a transformation as a result of her desire for knowledge, which took her to Harvard and Cambridge and over oceans and continents. Only then would she start to doubt whether she had gone too far and whether there was still a way back.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”
“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell”
“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”
Dr. Richard Shepherd has dedicated his life to learning about the mysteries of the dead as the foremost forensic pathologist in the UK. Shepherd is responsible for determining the cause of sudden or unexpected deaths. Shepherd has conducted over 23,000 post-mortems, and each one is a unique detective narrative. Dr. Shepherd solves the problem to respond to our most important question: How did this individual die? with his skill, commitment, and understanding.
Shepherd doesn’t take anything for granted in his quest for the truth, be it a serial killer, a natural calamity, a “perfect murder,” or a freak accident. And although he has been a part of some of the most well-known cases in recent memory, the most puzzling, intriguing, and even weird encounters are frequently those that are less well-known. His proof has been used to convict murderers, let innocent people free, and overturn closed cases whether they were in or out of public view. But living in death and witnessing some of humanity’s most repulsive aspects comes with a cost, and Shepherd is unafraid to calculate what it will cost him and his family.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I am no stranger to joy. I know that joy can be truly experienced only by those who have known adversity. And adversity is an inevitability.”
― Richard Shepherd, Unnatural Causes
“one of the greatest skills I have learned is not to feel a moral repulsion which others might think is not only justified but required.”
― Richard Shepherd, Unnatural Causes
“It was hard to imagine that the slender young man who lay naked on the post-mortem table had just finished a killing spree. Everyone in the room – police officers, mortuary staff, even Pam – stared at him with incomprehension. He looked as vulnerable as any victim of crime, as any of his own victims.”
― Richard Shepherd, Unnatural Causes
“The meeting introduced me- or, perhaps no introduction was necessary- to the awful collision between the silent, unfeeling dead and the immensity of feeling they generate in the living. I left the room with relief, making a mental note to avoid the bereaved at all costs and stick to the safe world inhabited by the dead, with its facts, its measurements, its certainties. In their universe, there was a complete absence of emotion. Not to mention its ugly sister, pain.”
― Richard Shepherd, Unnatural Causes: The Life and Many Deaths of Britain’s Top Forensic Pathologist
Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s SEAL task unit were dispatched to the bloodiest battlefield in Iraq with the almost impossible objective of assisting American forces in securing Ramadi, a city that was considered to be “all but lost.” They discovered that leadership—at every level—is the most crucial element in determining whether a team succeeds or fails via dramatic first-person narratives of bravery, heartbreaking loss, and hard-won wins in SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser. After their deployment, Willink and Babin established SEAL leadership training, which assisted in developing the next generation of SEAL leaders. They founded Echelon Front, a business that teaches these similar leadership concepts to corporations and organizations, after leaving the SEAL Teams.
Babin and Willink have assisted numerous clients across a wide range of industries in building their own elevated teams and dominating their battlefields, from momentum going to Fortune 500 organizations.
Now, Extreme Ownership explains the mindset and values that allow SEAL units to successfully complete the most challenging missions in warfare and demonstrates how to apply them to any team, family, or organization. Each chapter is devoted to a particular subject, such as Cover and Move, Decentralized Command, and Leading Up the Chain, and explains what it is, why it is significant, and how to use it in any leadership setting.
Extreme Ownership revolutionizes business management and pushes leaders everywhere to realize their true objective: lead and win. It does this through a gripping narrative with effective instruction and direct application.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Discipline equals freedom.”
“It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.”
“The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win—you pass the test. If you are mentally weak for that moment and you let that weakness keep you in bed, you fail. Though it seems small, that weakness translates to more significant decisions. But if you exercise discipline, that too translates to more substantial elements of your life.”
“Implementing Extreme Ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership, and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.”
“the most fundamental and important truths at the heart of Extreme Ownership: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.”
A recognized tie-in to the well-known television program Criminal Minds The FBI profilers for the program identify the kind of criminal they’re looking for and present some instances in the briefing that is featured in the majority of Criminal Minds episodes. These examples are detailed in this book. Organized by criminal type, it includes information on solo serial killers, sexual predators, and assassins who claimed notoriety for their victims. It also includes information on numerous infamous murders, such as David Berkowitz, Jeffrey Dahmer, Mark David Chapman, and the Zodiac killer.
The book Criminal Minds: Sociopaths, Serial Killers, and Other Deviants explores the criminal minds that exist among us in an engrossing and horrifying way.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Common early indicators of serial murder are bed-wetting, fire-starting, and animal torture, sometimes called the McDonald Triad”
The first non-fiction book by New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner and University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt is titled Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. The book, which was released on April 12 by William Morrow, has been characterized as fusing pop culture and economics.
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? Freakonomics will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.