The best books on the intersection of history, business, and personality

This book held my hands to a high bar while accumulating, through good storytelling, the truths of a company, both clear and nuanced, as I searched for them in the early George A. Hormel & Company.

Arsenault’s book upends many beliefs we hold about “good companies” that provide stable, long-term jobs to hundreds of employees, like this prominent and popular paper mill in Mexico, Maine, where Arsenault’s family worked through multiple generations. The long-term economic safety and security that employees had felt for years is upended by their numerous life-threatening, sometimes intractable, cancers.

I loved this book for its investigative environmental journalism, its exposure of truths the powerful did not want to be exposed, and its influence on my own research. 

This book did for me what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle did for millions in 1906—it made me think deeply about the safety of our food supply, how the animals we turn into our meats are handled, and the treatment of the workers who kill, cut, and pack our meats.

Genoways’ searing expose of current-day meatpacking plants became a companion to my own research on the early days of Hormel and its competitors. His stories about the people who work in our factories portray the devastating tradeoffs in health and safety they must make for their livelihood, costs that ultimately fall to all of us.

Through long conversations with workers, we learn of their exposure to preventable accidents and diseases and a continuously accelerated “chain” that requires their ever-faster labor. I felt like I was on the cutting floor alongside them, just trying to keep up. Today's workforce, like it was in my grandfather’s time, is mostly made up of our newest immigrants. 

This is the best book I’ve read about the human dreams and failings of white-collar criminals.

With Soltes’ direct access to headline names—like Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, and Marc Drier—I steeped myself in his profound research on our myths about “nurture vs. nature,” whether companies are inherently “good” or “bad,” and whether criminal behavior inside companies is performed by fundamentally “bad” people. The book taught me about the psyche of embezzlers and the conditions inside companies that influence their stealing. That knowledge took me beyond my own familial myths about George Hormel’s embezzler and enhanced my understanding of why he likely did his stealing.

The book also outlined the great impact of white-collar crime on families, companies, and our economy, leading me to a more nuanced understanding of southern Minnesota in the 1920s. History and humanity are woven together in whole cloth, and Soltes’ work allowed me to speculate about the complicity of each man drawn into the early Hormel embezzlement alongside the city and region that nurtured them.  

I believe in reading across genres and that including poetry and fiction in my daily routine impacts the rhythm, cadence, and freedom of my memoirs.

This book was a fictional game changer and confidence booster as Dias was doing what I was trying to do in my true crime investigation—bringing together the forces of history, business, and personality in a page-turning story. Dias plaits together the lives of a Wall Street tycoon and the daughter of unconventional elites in New York City whose stories intersect across a full century, with profound implications for the meaning of power, wealth, and legacy.

This gripping novel made me understand better how the trauma my grandfather must have felt after his forced resignation from the company he’d built and loved was passed down to my father and me. It’ll take another read to figure out how Diaz puzzled together his story, but I’m sure glad and grateful he did! 

This book informed my macroeconomic thinking on the way banks and companies have long been twined and the complex decisions that ultimately somebody—whether company boards or government regulators—need to make when they fail.

This was a perfect study for my own research into the near collapse of the early Hormel company and the reason why it still exists today; Sorkin’s chosen title would apply. Companies have an impact, both good and sometimes bad, and our regional and national economies often suffer from their hubris and greed.

Sorkin’s master storytelling kept me riveted and mesmerized all the way through six hundred and forty pages.