MixedBookforumA reckoning with [McDonelll\'s] own privileged upbringing ... The vacillation in these moments—between grandiosity and remorse—is probably inherent to the project. McDonell is trying to write from two distinct urges, to confess his own feelings and to expose the lives of others ... But when McDonell switches from getting something out of his system to trying to expose the system, I occasionally feel the edge of his perception going dull. Exposure requires a different animating force than confession: you have to be willing to piss people off. As a journalist, McDonell knows this, but I don’t think there’s much in Quiet Street that would ruffle the feathers of its own subjects.
Reeves Wiedeman
PositiveBookforumBy speaking the woozy language of a Silicon Valley world-changer, Neumann put himself in the running for the kind of venture-capital money that typically flows toward businesses with minimal physical assets. This is intriguing because WeWork isn’t a tech company ... Investors ignored the contradiction and gave Neumann a lot of money. People who were usually intelligent became almost delusional in his presence ... it’s a story about a brief collective delusion shared among Neumann and some finance guys, a story whose central question is not how WeWork failed, but how Neumann convinced so many people that it wouldn’t. Wiedeman’s book implies a possible answer: male envy and status obsession. Neumann embodied qualities that his investors wanted but didn’t possess.
