I’d argue the chatterati class fragmented into multiple discourse currents around 2007. Kinda like cable explosion in 80s.
For eg: Piketty = HBO
Sapiens = MTV
etc.
I count a dozen “channel scale” books.
I’m waiting for the Comedy Central/Cartoon Network book tbh.
Let’s inventory the channel scale books then.
Jobs bio
Sapiens
Sovereign Individual
Zero to One
Blitzscaling
Lean In
Lean Startup
Factfulness
Some musk book
not certain. Generative.
These seem tech specific. Maybe tech is the ESPN bundle.
I’d say the generic ones are:
Piketty
Sapiens
Sovereign Individual
Hillbilly Elegy
Vaclav Smil
Debt
Maybe Moses Naim
Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow
Each started a specific conversation
Book on tech/management almost never level up up to this level of discourse. Possibly the only one I can recall in my life is Lee Iacocca’s biography being weirdly broadly popular in the 80s.
General zeitgeist discourse has no clue books like zero to one even exist.
Peters’s IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE *almost* reached that level in the 1980s. Going way back you could argue that Taylor’s PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT (1911) did so.
I think of this class of books as “books busy fortune 100 CEOs like to pretend they’ve read for Davos and make cringe clueless approving comments about, for signaling purposes, regardless of merit”
Sapiens wins the top prize imo
Yeah, if that’s the definition of the category, SAPIENS definitely wins. That’s a little different from the category I had in mind, but that’s a good category.