Reset: My Fight for Inclusion & Lasting Change by Eileen Pao

Hardcover, 274 pgs, Pub Sept 19th 2017 by Spiegel & Grau, ISBN13: 9780399591013 Lit Awards: Shortlisted 2017 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of Year Nominee

I venture to guess that anyone reading Ellen Pao's personal experience about the discrimination she alleges at the hands of partners in the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins will find something in it with which to identify. I don’t expect anyone disbelieves her account. The cliquish melodrama of board meetings or the exclusionary after-hours drinking and strip clubs will be familiar to many, not all of them women. The truth is, the watch-your-back lifestyle of partners out for themselves in a corporate environment can get pretty ugly, particularly when large amounts of money are thrown about.

Pao is just one of the first women to document how such exclusionary behaviors affects so-called attempts to diversify management away from white men who probably [should] feel a little uncertain about sitting atop a corporation that is supposed to have its hand wrapped around the zeitgeist. But any uncertainty these white men feel about their position is no excuse for discrimination based on sex, color, sexual orientation.

Let’s face it: Ellen Pao is one very special individual, but she’s not going to change American corporate culture all on her own. She merely points out how childish corporate culture can become when adults with family responsibilities and an obligation to think outside the box and be challenged in their thinking try to find ways around those obligations.

Ellen goes through whole sordid, tiresome saga of being given seats in the back of the room, not being invited to business dinners (or even some business meetings!), of being asked to get the coffee or pass the cookies, chapter and verse, yada yada, but here it is, bluntly:

”As my time in venture wore on, more and more I began to notice my colleagues’ desperate unwillingness to depart from what they knew. The fear seemed, to me, to come from social anxiety. Almost all these men—and they were nearly all men—were awkward with each other and filled the awkwardness with clunky, inappropriate conversations. They might spend a full hour discussing porn stars and debating their favorite type of sex worker…Some would check out and flirt with the much younger administrative assistants—half to a third their age—and some would make racist jokes that weren’t funny…Or sexist jokes…week after week after week, and sometimes more than once in the same day.”

I will take a stab at suggesting that we’ve all been there…in high school. Ellen Pao grew up Asian American in a white world. She knows all about different. She knows about Asia and she knows about America. Not exclusionary. Not arrogant. Not, in fact, entirely sure of herself, despite three IV-league degrees in engineering, law and business. But she’s had enough of the chortling adolescents with sexual hand gestures—in school and at work.

Pao’s loss against Kleiner Perkins may define her, but not in the way the partners thought. Ellen Pao is not only a star, but a thought leader. At the end of this book detailing her discrimination case against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, she writes of work done as CEO of reddit. They were one of the first internet firms to take down user content that was anti-social, hate speech, pornographic, or harassing. Those are difficult decisions to make. No other company was able to make that decision until she had. After reddit she set up a venture, Project Include, to help early- to mid-stage tech firms diversify their leadership and management teams. She acknowledges change is hard, that it won’t happen on its own, and that lessons her team has learned can be useful for firms wanting to start but who are overwhelmed with choices.

This book is not merely Pao’s side of the Kleiner Perkins lawsuit. It is Pao’s take-aways from that soul-crushing experience. This book is how you know this woman is going to power up and over any obstacle in her way. The thing she seems to understand is that diversity is, well, diverse. Not everyone thinks alike. That can divide a group, but Pao is betting that making people feel comfortable speaking out, contributing, and showcasing their special talents will bring a cohesiveness that will make the group succeed. Let’s hope so. Be prepared for something radical. And watch this woman. My money’s on her.

Some extremely nasty commentary took place in the media before, during and after the Kleiner Perkins lawsuit, including this somewhat absurd piece in Fortune by Fox News contributor and now Fortune executive editor Adam Lashinsky and Katie Benner. The authors point out a real logical inconsistency: that Ellen Pao’s “jaw-dropping” and “bold” lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins “flew in the face of past criticisms levied against her by Kleiner partners — that she was passive, that she waited for orders, and that she was risk-averse.” Pao answers all the questions raised in this article fully and adequately, even eloquently, in this book. As I contend, I’ve seen these behaviors before. Theirs don’t make sense. Hers do. I’m with her.



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Kill 'Em and Leave by James McBride

Hardcover, 256 pgs Pub April 5th 2016 by Spiegel & Grau (first published February 2nd 2016) ISBN13: 9780812993509

It looks like McBride did his interviews for this book about music phenom James Brown in 2012, long before this book was published in 2016. In the Foreword McBride crankily reveals he was being taken to the cleaners in a divorce settlement and he needed to write this book—any book—to bring in a little money.

Any flaws this book contains then become perfectly understandable, and McBride keeps up that level of honesty and casual explanation all the way through. This is no stilted celebrity biography covering well-trod ground. This is down home and personal, gentle conversations with the men (they were mostly men) and women who knew most about James Brown and his life.

At the end of his story, McBride highlights the 62-year-old grandmother journalist Sue Summer who, writing for the financially strapped Newberry Observer in South Carolina, has kept in the public eye the disgraceful carnage made of James Brown’s $100 million estate. Brown’s will stipulated the bulk of his estate should go to educate poor children in Georgia and South Carolina, the states where he grew up, but within days of his death on Christmas Day in 2006, his family had arrayed a bevy of lawyers to contest the will citing ‘undue influence.’

That ‘influence’ would have been the South Carolina lawyer David Cannon who had been hired by Brown to extricate him from IRS charges of underpayments. Cannon and Buddy Dallas, a Georgia lawyer, were white men who had never worked for a black boss before. They brought Brown back from destitution when his act suffered the toll performers experience when they age, and when the IRS realized they’d been robbed. They set up what they’d thought was an unbreakable trust serving poor children and then suffered personal attacks and rake-backs as the trust was contested.

James Brown played a role in McBride’s youth—in every young black man’s youth, is McBride’s contention—being a role model and human divinity of soul. His concerts and records made a difference in how the world turned. The 1960’s-70’s were the height of his popularity, but he made a mark that lasted to his death, and McBride argues, will long after. “Kill ‘em and leave,” Brown exhorted the younger men he mentored. Don’t hang around after a concert for folks to pick your carcass clean. Make ‘em wait.

McBride spins his story out slowly, the way he collected it, through innumerable interviews with band members and managers, friends, and family. He is conversational and not cruel when he tells us the plain facts of James Brown’s lonely upbringing, early incarceration, exceptional singing talent, and enormous drive. Brown never wanted to be hungry or lonely or dependent ever again, especially to the white man, who he feared.

There was a moment near the end of McBride’s story about Brown that widened out for me into a real down-home truth we all learn eventually: “there’s talent everywhere.”

“I remember having lunch years ago with a legendary record executive in L.A., bending his ear about a great unsigned singer I knew. The guy listened, nodded, yawned, reached for his triple-decker sandwich, and took a bite. ‘Great singers,’ he said between chews, ‘are a dime a dozen.’”

That’s right. That’s right for every field. If they don’t have ‘em, they’ll make ‘em. But more importantly, and listen to this: those executives—they aren’t so special either. They do a job, but somehow we’ve allowed them to capture an unnatural percentage of the take. They have nothing without the talent and the rest of the organization, but you wouldn’t know it talking to them. But there is a truth in that it takes more than talent to be a great star, if that is where you are aiming. It takes more determination than talent.

Brown had determination. He wanted to present his best side to the world, so no one would have cause to put him down. After shows he would sit through 3 hours of treatment under the hair dryer to get his pompadour back in shape…and then he would leave without seeing the fans waiting for him. Kill ‘em and leave.

I loved the way McBride told this story, mixing a little of himself in there. He’d gone to Columbia Journalism School in 1980, so was undoubtedly aware that the reporter should scrupulously keep himself out of the story. But his ease with the scene and his knowledge of the backstory, his understanding of the silences between questions and his sense of the real meaning of James Brown gave us the mystery of the man and a deep sense of his place in pantheon of black culture. I loved hearing the familiar names, Rev Al Sharpton and Michael Jackson among them, and seeing how they fit in this picture.

It’s a comfortable, unstrained telling of a difficult life built on success. Race is everywhere in this book, though it is rarely mentioned. The fact of America’s race situation both made James Brown who he was as a performer, but it constrained him as a human being. McBride gives us that, shows us how that was. A book by McBride is cause for celebration, no matter that the editing was a little off, or he repeated sections. This is a story you won’t want to miss.

It was fine to look back at James Brown at his peak, singing "It's a Man's World" in Paris in 1967. And McBride mentions the legendary 1964 TAMI concert in Santa Monica , a warm-up slot for a Rolling Stones performance that Mick Jagger forever after regretted because James Brown & The Famous Flames burned the place down, making the Stones look like a high school band. Below find a link to the full concert that night:



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Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

Hardcover, 336 pages Pub October 21st 2014 by Spiegel & Grau ISBN13: 9780812994520

There is definitely something amiss with my view of crime. I read crime mysteries and police procedurals for pleasure, but reading about crime from the other side—innocence and guilt or suspects and law or the possibility that the criminal justice system can be wrong—makes me anxious and fretful. I don’t like crime. It seems like weakness.

What I have come to see is that crime can occur on either side of a prosecution or conviction: the accused can be guilty of weakness or legal counsel can be guilty of weakness. Both are crimes, but they are not always pursued with the same diligence. It is this travesty of justice that is so disturbing.

My judgment of ‘criminals’ had always been that they made a mistake, sometimes just a little mistake, but they should pay for their crime. If they killed someone, that was a big mistake, and those folks should also pay for their crime. I wasn’t going to worry about the death penalty since they didn’t. The world has too many huge problems to worry about the life of some murderer. One can make a mistake, one just has to pay for it. I trusted the system worked…that if the crime was really manslaughter or had some other mitigating circumstances, that the courts would battle it out. I was more concerned with justice for the victims of crime.

In a discussion over the death penalty with family, my mother mentioned that we couldn’t apply the death penalty anymore because sometimes the convictions are wrong. Mistakes are made. Bryan Stevenson shows us that sometimes it is not mistake, or ‘accident’ that an innocent black man, or child, is chosen to stand guilty for a crime committed. Sometimes it is malice and intentional prejudice that such things happen in the United States, not just in the past, but now. Today. In that case, if mistakes, accidents, or purposeful crimes are committed against the accused, we cannot use a death penalty, morally. End of conversation.

This book tells us some of Stevenson’s early cases, some he won, some he lost. Midway through his account of working on wrongful imprisonment cases in the south, Georgia and Alabama, he recounts in detail the release of a inmate on death-row for six years, Walter McMillan, on whose behalf he’d been working for at least two years. We are hungry for the details, how it played out, if McMillan got compensation, if anyone was held responsible for wrongful imprisonment. It’s a story that makes one angry and grateful, all at the same time.

Below please find a 30-minute TED talk by Bryan Stevenson that explains some of the things he’s learned since he began working with death-row inmates. This TED talk comes when he is in his early fifties. This book was written in 2014, two years later. He began working with the Southern Center for Human Rights in the summers from Harvard Law School when he was in his early twenties. That’s nearly thirty years working and learning all about wrongdoing on both sides of what we call a crime.


Let’s admit something here: Stevenson is an unusual man. He says in that TED talk that he learned that people are more than their crimes. That may be true, but I am not as forgiving as he is. How he got to that safe place in his head begins to sound like Mother Teresa among the lepers…helping those with the least resources among us. It occurs to me that he could not live if he didn’t forgive, with all that he has seen.

But he has looked at the criminal justice system as closely as anyone so we have to ask: Can capital punishment ever be fair? What is justice? He makes the point that incarceration has become an industry which can perpetuate racial injustice, and he makes an impassioned case for why we shouldn’t charge juveniles as adults.

”We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity….if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears…if we acknowledged our brokenness, we could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.”

Justice is hard, like most things worth doing, but we have to try.

“The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent…”

Ah. So there it is. He makes his point.

The audio is read by the author, and published by Random House Audio. It is a good book to listen to, if one has time. It may be faster to read, but I found myself slowing down over some of his cases. It is difficult for me to focus on some of the horrible lives and terrible choices people make. It makes me feel a little hopeless, too, that we could get to this place. I believe we must not unjustly imprison people, but I am not willing to go so far as to say every crime requires my absolution. I don’t think Stevenson is asking that. What he does say is

”We’re trying to stop the death penalty…We’re trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who’ve been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice. Were trying to help the poor and do something about indigent defense and the fact that people don't get the legal help they need. We’re trying to do help people who are mentally ill. We’re trying to stop them from putting children in adult jails and prisons. We’re trying to do something about poverty and the hopelessness that dominates poor communities. We want to see more diversity in decision-making roles in the justice system for racial justice. We’re trying to confront abuse of power by police and prosecutors…”

I agree with all that. If there wouldn’t be another criminal after we’ve addressed all the things we have neglected to do, I wouldn’t be sorry.

The oral arguments for the case Evan Miller v Alabama that Stevenson argued and won before the U.S. Supreme Court.



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Insane Clown President by Matt Taibbi

Hardcover Expected pub: January 17th 2017 by Spiegel & Grau (ISBN13: 9780399592461)

Matt Taibbi is a helluva writer. Even if you don't agree with his political views, you might kinda wish you did…to see what he sees. He is really funny, and it is inevitable that you will choke out a few guffaws against your will when he goes after someone you fell for, or settled for. Sucker. The only person Taibbi doesn't speak of in sarcastic or cynical tones is Bernie Sanders, who never tried to entertain us so much as educate, inform, and move us.

After the election in November last year, Taibbi wrote a last dispatch in which he heralds some of the thoughts he exercises in this book. Called President Trump: How America Got it So Wrong this article published in Rolling Stone gives you some idea of who Taibbi is and how he writes, in case he slipped your notice. He no longer works full time for that magazine, but has moved to First Look Media, working with Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras. His leaving statement from Rolling Stone is presented here.

Listening to Washington news today, I am getting the burning sensation in my belly again. Trump just had his first news conference (1/11/17) and listening to his incomplete sentences and careless way of speaking started my slow burn. What is he trying to say? Why should we have to have an interpreter? Who should be our interpreter? Breitbart? KellyAnne? My anxiety and frustration will kill me if I have to listen to this straight on. I am afraid I may only be able to view Trump’s presidency through a filter or in the rear view mirror.

Which brings me to Taibbi. Taibbi followed the campaign trail as much as he was able this time round, and filed reports that were meant to dovetail with the illustration work of Victor Juhasz. This book, after the preface in which Taibbi takes a long view, is a collection of his dispatches from the 2016 campaign trail, following a long tradition beginning with Hunter S. Thompson.

In these dispatches, Taibbi makes comment on events as they unfolded, recognizing that the anti-truth candidate might win but still reiterating that he "can’t." It may be too soon for some of you, scarred from that campaign as you are, to even consider laughing at the unbelievable thing we as a country did in electing Trump. But some say to jump right back on the saddle, and Taibbi is a great trail leader.

Taibbi admits, despite his writing eight years earlier a book about a post-truth society based on fake conspiracies and exemplified by Fox News called The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, that even he did not foresee that a charlatan like Trump could hijack an electorate that voted twice! for Barack Obama, and which had led movements in racial parity and same sex rights. Therefore, while he is critiquing the “childlike” crowds that throng to Trump rallies, faces turned like believers to the clarion call a of television evangelist, throughout the year preceding the vote Taibbi can’t believe this clown can possibly win.

He is disbelieving but accurate and very, very, funny in describing the absurd Republican debates fielding seventeen candidates for president. Clearly some folks weren’t getting the memos, or, as we had surmised for some time already, were refusing to go along with the Party hierarchy. Well, they reaped what they sowed: confusion.

But what Taibbi does very well indeed is show us how long we have been living with our heads in the sand while small indignities were perpetrated upon us, e.g., Fox News Channel the only news network available on some cheap cable packages when free public television was not; news networks hiring attractive airheads who all ask the same questions and parrot one another until we get less accomplished in an hour of watching than if we’d had the TV off, etc. We were victims but we didn’t rise up.

Taibbi helps, along with giving us a few laughs, to chart the train wreck that was the election and pinpoints moments when the cake-icing edifice melted and started to slide off the steaming heap it was hiding. For me in particular, he makes me wonder how we will manage without news organizations worthy of the effort of reading/listening to them. Traditional newspaper outlets have been under stress for many years now, and their ranks are decimated. TV news, you already know, are terrifying in their ineptness & self-satisfaction. They need to hire armies of journalists to back up their newscasts rather than taking big profits and giving such high salaries. They simply must do a better job informing us (and themselves).

I listened to the audio production of this book, produced by Penguin Random House Audio and read by Rob Shapiro. Shapiro has just the right amount of incredulity and snark in his voice to accentuate the disbelief and horror in Taibbi’s tale of woe.

Below please find a short sample clip of the audiobook:




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Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Trevor Noah’s memoir about growing up mixed in South Africa ends with a bang. In some ways, he is the manifestation of his mother’s dream of escape. A dream of equality might be a step too far, but escape…escape from Soweto, a township “designed to be bombed” with a population of one million and only two roads in or out.

”The story of Soweto is the story of driveways. It is a hopeful place.”

Trevor’s mother’s family lived in Soweto, and though she had courageously—even foolishly, white people in this country might say—gone to live where black people were prohibited in Johannesburg, she somehow managed to make it all work: finding work, renting an apartment, becoming a single mom. She actually charted, as best she could, a future for her family that looked very different from what was expected. That level of desperation is not well known among white people in America.

Although this is a memoir of a thirty-two-year-old comedian, and perhaps because it is the memoir of a thirty-two-year-old comedian, Trevor's mother’s story is the one that resonates most keenly. But let’s give credit where credit is due: Trevor has an amazing delivery. All the while we are listening to the most difficult material, the scariest or most tragic stuff we've never had to face growing up, all the while we are ready to laugh, or to crack a smile. He keeps it light, but he definitely shows how he moved from being “born a crime” into actual crime without making it seem criminal.

"Listen, you shouldn’t get upset. Black people don’t have any money, so trying to get more stuff for less money is just what we do. But let me help. I’ll be your middleman…"

Noah spent most of his youth on the outside of every society he was in, a good position to see each group for what it was. In school he learned to mediate between competing groups and sell them things…pirated CDs, games, food. One day he is caught on film stealing candy from a mall shop that was closed. His interrogators, despite seeing his features and face, thought the boy on film was white, and therefore, despite lengthily interrogating Noah and showing him the film numerous times, Noah himself wasn’t suspected. That level of colorblindness may be more rare in America. It's hard to say that Noah's personality didn't confuse things.

Noah’s facility with languages was his entree into gaining acceptance with diverse populations. He could sound like anyone, speak their language, and earn a spot in their group.

"I could be a part of any group that was laughing…I’d catch a bit of their conversation, learn more about their group, and then leave. I never overstayed my welcome. I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t an outcast…"

After school he moved into an apartment with help from his mother and a push from his stepfather. He hustled on the streets for years, earning enough to eat and not much more. What came in went out.

"Hustling is to work what surfing the internet is to reading…maximal effort put into minimal gain."

This period of his life is recounted in such an honest way it is sure to be familiar to many who grew up poor in a city with lousy opportunities. What was going to be a short-term hustle to earn enough to get into college became an end in itself. Noah’s "Go Hit-ler" chapter should go down in South African history books as a funny but cautionary tale, a consequence of the separation of the races. It shows us how a teen already out of school and thought to be educated could be so completely ignorant of history. A spectacular end to the street hustle made Noah rethink his prospects.

There are so many quotes and revealing moments in this book, I am tempted to pick them all out for you, but you simply must read it for yourselves. This is the story of a man we can see every night on television, showing us how to laugh at our queer customs and queerer politicians. It is an education how racism plays out in one of the most racially-divided states on earth. The South African government before the end of apartheid made very discrete categories of race to keep the groups separate. But people “want to mix,” Noah tells us, “humans being humans and sex being sex.” Besides that, we are just curious, interested. Why do we, even we Americans, insist on keeping segregation going? What on earth can be worse than what we had in the past or what we have now?

This is an absorbing and deeply informative look at growing up mixed in South Africa. I read Netgalley’s ebook advance from Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, and regret that photographs were not included with the advance copy. Hopefully with the hardcover you will see Noah and his mother, both remarkable people, at various stages of their lives.

An excellent discussion of this book on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross is here. Below please find a brilliant riff on African dictators by Comedy Central's Daily Show host, Trevor Noah, and why we should care.






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