The 2018 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards Current Events & Public Affairs Book Giveaway

We have been dedicating our giveaways for the past two months to the books on the longlist for the 2018 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year. We have just two categories left. This week, we have the books in the Current Events & Public Affairs category for you, which are listed below along with the publishers' descriptions of the books. You can find our take on the category in our latest installment of posts taking readers Inside the Longlist.

Each of this week's winners will receive one copy of all five books in the category.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang, Portfolio

Silicon Valley is a modern utopia where anyone can change the world. Unless you’re a woman.

For women in tech, Silicon Valley is not a fantasyland of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows, and 3D-printed lollipops, where millions of dollars grow on trees. It’s a “Brotopia,” where men hold all the cards and make all the rules. Vastly outnumbered, women face toxic workplaces rife with discrimination and sexual harassment, where investors take meetings in hot tubs and network at sex parties.

In this powerful exposé, Bloomberg TV journalist Emily Chang reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures despite decades of companies claiming the moral high ground (Don’t Be Evil! Connect the World!)—and how women are finally starting to speak out and fight back.

Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao’s high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they “won’t lower their standards” just to hire women. Interviews with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and former Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer—who got their start at Google, where just one in five engineers is a woman—reveal just how hard it is to crack the Silicon Ceiling. And Chang shows how women such as former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, entrepreneur Niniane Wang, and game developer Brianna Wu, have risked their careers and sometimes their lives to pave a way for other women.

Silicon Valley’s aggressive, misogynistic, work-at-all costs culture has shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world. It’s time to break up the boys’ club. Emily Chang shows us how to fix this toxic culture—to bring down Brotopia, once and for all.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler, St. Martin’s Press

A colorful, character-driven dive deep into the gig economy.

More than one in three American workers is now a freelancer, and the gig economy, where workers are hired by the job—without the guarantee of steady hours or benefits—has quickly become an essential and seemingly permanent part of the U.S. labor market. High-profile tech startups like Uber and Airbnb are constantly in the news for the disruption they bring to the industries they overturn, but no one has yet zeroed in on the effects of this disruption on the workforce carrying it out.

In the tradition of the great business narratives of our time, Gigged offers a deeply-sourced, story-driven account of this new economy as it has been experienced by real people working in a range of professions. Weaving together the voices and experiences of influential tech entrepreneurs, top-flight economists, and in particular on the workers themselves, journalist Sarah Kessler wades through the hype and hyperbole the surrounds the gig economy.

Following a group of five main characters based everywhere from rural Arkansas to New York City, Kessler offers a nuanced look at how the future of work is playing out in real time across America. She tackles the big questions surrounding the future of work: can jobs be flexible and pay a sustainable wage? Will the millennial generation ever do as well their parents? How can meaningful, well-paid work be made more accessible to all?

The Pan-Industrial Revolution: How New Manufacturing Titans Will Transform the World by Richard D'Aveni, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A stunning look at what will happen to global industry as 3-D printing quickly becomes a worldwide phenomenon–and how this will influence our economic and geopolitical landscape.

Best-selling author Richard D’Aveni contends that the advent of massive, industrial-scale 3-D printing is already happening quietly under the radar, and that it will have a far-reaching impact that most corporate and governmental leaders have yet to anticipate or understand.

3-D printing, now called additive manufacturing, has moved far beyond a desktop technology used by hobbyists to churn out trinkets and toys. In this eye-opening account, D’Aveni reveals how recent breakthrough advances have been secretly adapted by powerful Fortune 500 companies so that they can now manufacture jet engines, huge turbines, airplanes, automobiles, and so much more in a greatly shortened time frame.

Not only is this revolutionary technology transforming the landscape of manufacturing everywhere, but as D’Aveni contends, it is also destined to have a dramatic effect on the world economy. A handful of massively powerful corporations—what D’Aveni calls pan-industrials—will become as important as any tech giant in re-structuring the global order.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland, W.W. Norton & Company

An intimate, eye-opening portrait of San Francisco transformed by the tech boom.

San Francisco is changing at warp speed. Famously home to artists and activists, and known as the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement, in recent decades the Bay Area has been reshaped by Silicon Valley, the engine of the new American economy. The richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes, and cracks in the city’s facade—rapid gentrification, an epidemic of evictions, rising crime, atrophied public institutions—have started to show.

Inspired by Studs Terkel’s classic works of oral history, writer and filmmaker Cary McClelland spent several years interviewing people at the epicenter of the recent change, from venture capitalists and coders to politicians and protesters, from native sons and daughters to the city’s newest arrivals. The crisp and vivid stories of Silicon City’s diverse cast capture San Francisco as never before.

The book opens with a longtime tour guide recounting the history of the original Gold Rush and observing how little the people of his city pay attention to its history; it ends on Fisherman’s Wharf, with the proprietor of an arcade game museum reminding us that even today’s technology will become relics of the past. In between we hear from people who have passed through Apple, Google, eBay, Intel, and the other big tech companies of our time. And we meet those who are experiencing the changes at the grassroots level: a homeless advocate in Haight-Ashbury, an Oakland rapper, a pawnbroker in the Mission, a man who helped dismantle and rebuild the Bay Bridge, and a woman who runs a tattoo parlor in the Castro.

Silicon City masterfully weaves together a candid conversation across a divided community to create a dynamic portrait of a beloved city—and a cautionary tale for the entire country.

Silicon States: The Power and Politics of Big Tech and What It Means for Our Future by Lucie Greene, Counterpoint

In Silicon States, renowned futurist and celebrated international think-tank leader Lucie Greene offers an unparalleled look at the players, promises, and potential problems of Big Tech.

Through interviews with corporate leaders, influential venture capitalists, scholars, journalists, activists, and more, Greene explores the tension inherent in Silicon Valley’s global influence. If these companies can invent a social network, how might they soon transform our political and health-care systems? If they can revolutionize the cell phone, what might they do for space travel, education, or the housing market? As Silicon Valley faces increased scrutiny over its mistreatment of women, cultural shortcomings, and its role in widespread Russian election interference, we are learning where its interests truly lie, and about the great power these companies wield over an unsuspecting citizenry.

While the promise of technology is seductive, it is important to understand these corporations’ possible impacts on our political and socioeconomic institutions. Greene emphasizes that before we hand our future over to a rarefied group of companies, we should examine the world they might build and confront its benefits, prejudices, and inherent flaws. Silicon States pushes us to ask if, ultimately, this is the future we really want.