Rosh's Reviews

AUTHOR: Sarah Frier GENRE: Business NonFiction PUBLICATION DATE: April 14, 2020 RATING: 3.75 stars. Hardly anyone in the modern world can claim that he/she isn't on any social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp,... There is enough content on social networking for us to keep doomscrolling for hours on end. A scarier aspect of this sacrifice of productivity and sleep is that three of the top social networking media (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) are owned by Mark Zuckerberg under Facebook Inc. I can bet no one in the world knows as much about you as Zuckie & team do. ( Google and Amazon would be a close second and third respectively. ) In 'No Filter', Bloomberg tech journalist Sarah Frier takes a look at the birth, growth, takeover, and transformation of Instagram, the photo-sharing app created by Kevin Systrom in 2010. His intention was to give people the gift of expression, and also escapism. He designed Instagram to be a democratising, artisti...

AUTHOR: John Carreyrou GENRE: Investigative nonfiction, True Crime RATING: 4.5 stars. Imagine this. Right since childhood, you have had this burning desire to become a billionaire. You have your marketing plan ready, you have your investments ready, you have the external showy infrastructure ready, you have your personal PR portfolio ready,... The only thing not ready is the most crucial necessity: the product itself. What do you do then? Fake it till you make it. That's what Elizabeth Holmes did with Theranos. This book reveals the bloodthirsty (pun intended) ambition of Elizabeth Holmes, the young founder of Theranos, a healthcare corporation established in 2003 and so grandiose in its plans and marketing aggression that its peak valuation was about $10 billion in 2013 and 2014. Holmes named Theranos combining the words “therapy” and “diagnosis". Having a wealthy and reputed family helped her get the seed investments as well as the credibility, in spite of being a college dr...

AUTHOR: Howard Schultz GENRE: Business, Memoir PUBLICATION DATE: January 1, 1997 RATING: 3.25 stars. Howard D. Schultz served as the chairman and CEO of the Starbucks Corporation from 1986 to 2000, and then again from 2008 to 2017. USA TODAY has called him “the Bill Gates of Coffee.” This book was written in 1997, just a few years before he first stepped down from the active role of CEO of Starbucks and became its Chairman. Schultz comes from humble origins and is a self-made billionaire courtesy his stint with Starbucks. He wasn't the creator of the coffee megabrand but took it over and expanded it to the worldwide scale it runs on today. The book does make you wonder where Starbucks would have been if he hadn't envisaged bigger dreams for a company he wasn't even part of. Schultz is a marketer at his core, and hence he speaks like a marketer. He has a little bit of pomposity and comes off as very self-congratulatory. Nevertheless, the book makes for interesting reading, t...

AUTHOR: Katherine Eban GENRE: Investigative Nonfiction RATING: 4.75 stars. Everyone knows the lack of ethics in India. Corruption pervades the public and private sectors, and even the most conscientious of citizens can barely escape this now-routine fact of our lives. I had always assumed that certain sectors might still be sacrosanct because of their very nature of their existence. Right now though, after reading this book, I'm terribly depressed and worried and have lost almost all hopes about reform in this country. Bottle of Lies is an exposé by US investigative journalist Katherine Eban about the generic drug industry, its boom and its flaws. Ranbaxy is its primary target, viewed through the eyes of Dinesh Thakur, the whistle-blower who made public the deep-rooted unethical corruption within the company. Though the book primarily focuses on Ranbaxy, the list of companies Eban has named with actual instances of malpractices contains the who's who of the Indian Pharmaceutic...