Hence, when his new book I Love Capitalism! was announced, I asked my bookseller, Scott Raulsome of the great Burton’s Bookstore in Greenport, N.Y., to snag me the first copy he could lay hands on. This he did—three days before the official publication date!—and I devoured it in essentially one sitting. So much so that I immediately had to start reading it again.
Ken Langone is the guy who took Ross Perot’s EDS public while working for a small firm that had never done an IPO before. Founded Home Depot (the story of how he had to scramble around to find two million dollars of seed money is alone worth the price of the book). Stood loyal to Dick Grasso of the NYSE as Eliot Spitzer (a.k.a. Client 9) tried to crucify both of them. Said no to Madoff a couple of weeks before he imploded, not primarily because he couldn’t understand what Madoff was offering, but because that offer meant he was being disloyal to his past clients, many of whom Langone knew. Again: how could I not love this guy?
Well, be assured that you won’t be able to not love him either, and that you’ll find I Love Capitalism! both entertaining and inspiring.
• My friend Steven Pressfield wrote a great golf novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, which was transmogrified by Robert Redford into a pretty bad movie. Steve’s underappreciated memoir of that whole experience, The Authentic Swing, is a worthy follow-up to his The War of Art, and contains lessons for all of us. I mention it here because, a couple of times in Swing, Steve concludes that it’s impossible to make a serious film about golf—that the only truly successful golf movie is Caddyshack.
I was reminded of this observation by the publication of Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story by Chris Nashawaty. The first third of the book retells the basic progression: Harvard Lampoon—National Lampoon—Saturday Night Live—Animal House, with which many readers may be familiar. But it then develops into a hugely entertaining account of the chaotic creation of that iconic film.
I thought I remembered that my grandchildren’s father, David Dickerson, was an aficionado of the movie, and e-mailed my daughter Karen to ask if this were correct. She wrote back, “It is the basis of his life’s philosophy.” I gave it to David for Father’s Day, and now it’ll be a most welcome holiday gift for every person whose soul soars upon hearing the exclamation, “You buy a hat like that you get a free bowl of soup, eh?” And who reflexively cries out in response, “Looks good on you, though!”
• I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget reading the hagiographic puff piece in the June 12, 2014, issue of Fortune, extolling at great length an extraordinary young woman named Elizabeth Holmes and the revolutionary medical technology company she had created: Theranos.
Based on a stunning breakthrough that purportedly allowed Theranos to do the full range of blood testing from a pinprick, Ms. Holmes had raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, attracted such world class luminaries as George Shultz and Henry Kissinger to her board, and secured potentially massive agreements from retail partners like Safeway and Walgreens to offer the tests in all their locations.
The only problem was that there was no such technology, and the whole enterprise had long since degenerated into a massive fraud perpetrated and sustained by Ms. Holmes and her thuggish lover. A Wall Street Journal reporter named John Carreyrou began writing increasingly skeptical stories in 2015, and by 2017 the value of Theranos was zero. Mr. Carreyrou reports the whole (forgive me) blood-curdling saga in Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup.
Bethany McLean, who co-wrote the definitive book about Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room, puts it best in a jacket blurb, to which I defer: “You will not want to put this riveting, masterfully reported book down. No matter how bad you think the Theranos story was, you’ll learn that the reality was actually far worse.” Bad Blood is an importantly cautionary tale.