Author: John Battelle

I have to admit that I am a bit of a google-phile. I like a lot of their products and a lot of the way they do business, so my overview may seem a bit positively biased. The book isn’t just a biography of the rise of Google though. It is more an examination of search, how it has changed our culture and uses Google (obviously) as the rat to study.

Battelle introduces a term he calls “Database of Intentions, which is the sum total of all queries that pour into search engines daily, revealing the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of our culture.” It is obvious in the book that Battelle is more interested in search in an anthropological sense more than Google itself, though a lion’s share of the book is focused on Google. He has a great blog about search that can be found here.

You can also get it on audiobook here.

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Author: John Perkins

The subject of this book is the thing John Grisham novels are made of. An economic planner for an international consulting firm persuades developing countries to enter into deals that make American companies rich. Somehow the NSA ties into all this as well, which I don’t exactly understand how, but I guess that’s an incentive to read it. After years of being an “economic hit man”, Perkins leaves his former life and writes his expose, despite bribes and threatenings.

I can already see major studio execs salivating over the story, corporate corruption, governmental cover-up and a lone soul that tells his story despite threatening phone calls and blown up mailboxes. Anyways it sounds like an interesting read, even if it doesn’t provide much business knowledge.

In the review snippets is a link to an interview between the author and democracynow.org as well as a statement from the State Department about the book. Intriguing stuff.

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