Interview with Jennifer Jacquet, author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World
Jennifer Jacquet, author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World recommends some intriguing books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Jennifer's book:
Review from Book Depository:
Knowledge is power. Which is why the rich and powerful don't want you to have it.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World
The Playbook is an expose of the extraordinary lengths that corporations will go to in order to spread disinformation and deny the scientific facts - around climate change, public health risks and worker safety - when they don't suit their agenda.
Written in the form of a corporate handbook for tobacco, oil and pharmaceutical company executives, it is a litany of obfuscation techniques, denial, delays and outright lies, including: how to recruit an academic 'expert' who is willing to compromise their integrity (or is just short of cash), how to massage the statistics, how to use legal and even physical intimidation against reporters and activists, and how, just as in a casino, to keep your customers comfortable, unquestioning, unthinking and playing along for as long as possible.
Part satire, part social history, part guide to resistance, The Playbook is a charge sheet against the powerful. It shows us how, by understanding the methods and motives of disinformation campaigns, we may be able to outwit them.
Buy On:
Easons €23.79
Book Depository €17.80
Waterstones £16.99
Wordery $15.62
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Ways of Seeing by John Berger.
Review From Book Depository
'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.'
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Ways of Seeing
'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'
John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has.
Buy On:
Book Depository €9.81
Waterstones £9.99
Wordery $10.00
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
Empire of Pain. The brave and brutal story of the Sackler dynasty whose greed compromised public health.
Review From Book Depository:
The gripping and shocking story of three generations of the Sackler family and their roles in the stories of Valium, OxyContin and the opioid crisis.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions - Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis - an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people.
In this masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and host of the Wind of Change podcast Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-dropping and ferociously compelling reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of twenty-first-century greed.
Buy On:
Easons €11.99
Book Depository €11.22
Waterstones £8.49
Wordery $11.18
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Review From Book Depository:
Run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with E. L. Konigsburg's beloved classic and Newbery Medal--winning novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler!
(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
When Claudia decided to run away, she planned very carefully. She would be gone just long enough to teach her parents a lesson in Claudia appreciation. And she would go in comfort-she would live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She saved her money, and she invited her brother Jamie to go, mostly because be was a miser and would have money.
Claudia was a good organizer and Jamie bad some ideas, too; so the two took up residence at the museum right on schedule. But once the fun of settling in was over, Claudia had two unexpected problems: She felt just the same, and she wanted to feel different; and she found a statue at the Museum so beautiful she could not go home until she bad discovered its maker, a question that baffled the experts, too.
The former owner of the statue was Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Without her--well, without her, Claudia might never have found a way to go home.
Buy On:
Book Depository €19.75
Waterstones £10.50
Wordery $24.50
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
I prefer paper. And I prefer paperbacks to hardbacks.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
McNally Jackson on Prince. Because it’s down the street and I like going in.
Many thanks to Jennifer for recommending some intriguing books! Please don't forget to check out Jennifer's book The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Penguin Books Ltd (The Playbook, Ways of Seeing), Pan Macmillan (Empire of Pain), Simon & Schuster (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler).
< Home
