THE TESLA FILES: A Whistleblower, a Leak, a Fight for Truth: The Inside Story of Musk's Empire, what it says on the tin

THE TESLA FILES: A Whistleblower, a Leak, a Fight for Truth: The Inside Story of Musk's Empire
SÖNKE IWERSEN & MICHAEL VERFÜRDEN
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A whistleblower.
A 100BG-leak of confidential internal documents.

This is the story of the fight to expose the truth of Tesla.

Elon Musk is one of the wealthiest people in the world. Tesla made him a 300-times billionaire. Starlink turned him into a force in global conflicts. X became his personal megaphone, stoking political turmoil at the touch of a button. With SpaceX, he aims to conquer the stars.

But a whistleblower, a 100GB-leak of confidential Tesla documents and two investigative journalists reveal the frightening truth behind the façade: an unusually high number of workplace accidents in Musk’s factories, dangerous errors in Tesla's autopilot software, a culture of fear and deception, and countless broken promises.

Investigative journalists Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden take readers behind the shiny surface of Tesla. Through their chilling analysis of internal Tesla data and court documents set alongside the astonishing first-hand accounts of employees, customers and their bereaved families, The Tesla Files reveals a corporation in crisis. At its heart a billionaire who truly believes the world is his for the taking.

The definitive exposé of the world’s most powerful businessman and the rise and fall of his empire.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Systemic indifference to the privacy, the rights, really the importance of anyone not themselves is a hallmark of organizations connected to Muskolini. We saw that in the brazen theft of explicit and monetizable government data on taxpayers, for a start, by DOGE...never a Federal department, never authorized to do anything by the only legitimate authority, Congress, to act on behalf of the Federal government...that somehow has never been talked up by our media watchdogs in the US. Funny how Penguin Random House published this book in the UK but not the US, where a really small indie publisher brought it out; odd that a pair of German investigative journalists did this reporting, not anyone from a major US paper; and most interesting there's no translator credited anywhere in the book.

I'm sure the authors are sterling of character but I beg leave to presume they're not fluent enough in English to produce prose that does not raise my "say what now?" eyebrow. Deference to a famous, nay infamous lawsuit-filer with a serious need to control his public image? It can't be proven by me.

The facts as presented in this book are...let's stop at poor optics. It is definitely an exposé. I am inclined, on my own behalf, to agree with the bald statement the whistleblower is quoted as making in the book: "Elon Musk is evil." This being a matter of opinion it surprised me the authors left it in...until I read about Tesla's obscenely negligent handling of customer data, which you must agree to sign over to them when you buy one of their cars.

Twitter-destroyin', Starlink-abusin', money-hoardin' immigrant that he is, he's part of the culture we're living in, and it is my sincere hope that he, along with the Epstein-files-dwelling serial sexual abusers in his socioeconomic class, will be served justice before long.

A boy can dream.

UNTRACEABLE, ex-Soviet thriller author slyly pokes powerful people in the ribs..."I saw that!" with deniability

UNTRACEABLE
SERGEI LEBEDEV (tr. Antonina W. Bouis)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 2018, a former Russian secret agent and his daughter were poisoned with a lethal neurotoxin that left them slumped over on a British park bench in critical condition. The story of who did it, and how these horrendous contaminants were developed, captivates and terrifies in equal measure. It has inspired acclaimed author Sergei Lebedev’s latest page-turning novel.

At its center is a scheming chemist named Professor Kalitin, obsessed with developing an absolutely deadly, undetectable and untraceable poison for which there is no antidote. He becomes consumed by guilt over the death of his wife, the first accidental victim of his Faustian pact to create the ultimate venom, and the deaths of hundreds of test subjects. After he defects from the Soviet Union to spend his “retirement” years in the West, two Russian secret agents are dispatched to assassinate him.

In this fast-paced, genre-bending novel, Lebedev weaves tension-filled pages of stunningly beautiful prose exploring the historical trajectories of evil. From Nazi labs, Stalinist plots, the Chechen Wars, to present-day Russia, Lebedev probes the ethical responsibilities of scientists supplying modern tyrants and autocrats with ever newer instruments of retribution, destruction and control. Lebedev, one of Russia’s most important and exciting writers, has never been better.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I do not know why this story did not sell a million copies on release, or why so many highly respected outlets' praise (The New York Times, Library Journal, CrimeReads) did not result in bestsellerdom and a residency on top of the lists. It couldn't be the quiet discouragement of Powerful People, of course not...but somehow y'all slept on this well-told, excitingly plotted, extremely timely thriller.

What do you mean, "so did you"? No of course I didn't! I had...COVID...oh yeah...forgot about that.

Time to rectify that.

Let's start with the prose:

Kalitan felt uncomfortable. The pushy women, the noisy, grumbling line, the obnoxious kids annoyed him. The boys suddenly ran off and whispered to the adults pointing at the car. Kalitin turned around and saw that the bouncing ride had loosened the tarp. The sun shone on the monkey's dead face, yellow teeth bared in the pink mouth; shiny chrome-green flies crawled over the black fur.

A Goodreads friend, herself a novelist, used this passage to illustrate why the story did not work for her. I'm the opposite, in this case. As a reader of thrillers I want to see, to get into my eyes, the scenes; it's the m.o. of the thriller to be cinematic and evoke a response with urgency not build-up in most situations. I got my cues...yellow, pink interiors of vulnerability; metallic green, black, shiny exteriors of impermeability. My eyes are there.

It isn't going to work for everyone, but what does? Translator Bouis did not overcomplicate or undersell at any turn the intent of a thriller. I really got involved, as a result, in the way the story presents the conflict of guilt and culpability as reluctant internalization of results in physical reality.

Poisoning someone by premeditated action would come across as depraved, indifferent, if done in this framework. Instead this story is about creating conditions by one's curiosity and labor to resolve that curiosity in physical form that result in...entirely without one's own involvement...the greatest possible harm to a stranger. Think it's implausible? Go watch Oppenheimer, and/or read American Prometheus.

What works best in this way of presenting the story is (for me) the sheer number of SNAFUs and FUMTUs that plague attempts to "neutralize the threat" that is Kalitin's continued existence, after his creation is revealed to be the cause of death of politically inconvenient people. While he is not-really trying to deal with knowledge that processing would render horrifyingly painful, those trying to make their orders from on high real get more and more tripped up, screwed up, and outright thwarted by...well, everything.

It is always the case that ability to act outpaces ability to reflect. Kalitin is now reflecting, reluctantly, on his actions. We are not, thank goodness, subjected to his self-justifications. We see actions and results, we perceive probable responses, but we are never in the muck that is this morally compromised, no bankrupt, man's head. I think listening to a human's self-exculpatory inner chatter is pointless and painful.

A reckoning is a cathartic experience in life and in reading. Very, very seldom do reckonings come cleanly defined, with sharp edges and self-evident results. Fiction tries for that completeness at its peril, as this is fantasy fulfillment. Would you expect a Russian author, in the time of Little Vladdy Pu-Pu, to attempt that kind of blame assignment?

VZ: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Making of a Nation, urgent topic and sterling example of resisting fascists

VZ: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Making of a Nation
DMITRY BYKOV (tr. John Freedman )
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: How does a comedian become the face of a nation's fight for survival?

In VZ, celebrated Russian author Dmitry Bykov unpacks the extraordinary rise of Vladimir Zelenskyi—from a TV star to a wartime leader defying a global superpower. With wit and razor-sharp insight, Bykov dives into the moments that shaped Zelenskyi's improbable journey, revealing the man behind the headlines.

This is not just a story of one leader but of a nation on the edge, and the power of resilience in the face of overwhelming odds. Bykov offers a fresh, compelling take on Zelenskyi’s leadership, Ukraine’s struggle for sovereignty, and what it truly means to fight for democracy in the modern world.

For anyone eager to understand the making of a modern hero and the fierce will of a nation under siege, VZ is essential reading.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ukraine's president, a former performer who took on a mantle of identity formation for the ancient land of Ukraine, gets a hagiography. Bykov is a prolific writer, twelve novels and a slew of other biographies in his pocket, but until Open Letter brought this book out, nothing in English either in the UK or US markets. As translated by John Freedman, a prolific translator into English, the Bykov touch seems to serve a need to balance uncritical praise and honest assessment.

Everything starts for the Anglophone with the competing systems of Romanizing Russian and Ukrainian. They are as different as English and American, or Portuguese and Brazilian. This means they need to be transliterated differently. It will strike US readers as weird, and feel "wrong" to many who, like me, lived our entire lives accepting "USSR" and "Russia" as synonyms, "The Ukraine" being uncritically assumed to be part of both.

Volodymyr Zelenskyi (a usage common in the text; I'll use it here as I prefer it to double-y which breaks my brain) is the president of Ukraine's name. Learn it. We're not dictating anymore, old white guys, we're learning what to call people, how to spell it, when to say it. The fascism our fathers, their grandfathers, fought a war to defeat is cultural as well as political. We need to shed our old assumptions.

Accustoming myself to Author Bykov's code-switching between transliterations was as challenging as learning when to use "tu" versus the formal third person. It got to be automatic, and served as effective signposting of a source's sympathies. It's going to take effort from the deeply acculturated to the Cold War's polarities. In a multipolar world, people like Zelenskyi are the feared and/or anticipated breezes from outside certainty. There's a lot in Zelenskyi's past that makes him a good stand-in for global changes to get the old certainties to unclench: he's charismatic, he's deeply convinced of his cause's rightness not simply clinging to his power; his government, unsurprisingly, faces a lot of bad press with accusations of corruption and self-dealing that ring false and hollow, so don't stick. Reading this rather-too-long book demonstrates why: This is a man of integrity and convictions accusing by his existence those who embody other "values."

What you gain by reading this biography is a clear sense of *WHY* Ukraine unites behind the figure of Zelenskyi: He represents them, he says the words they want to hear, he makes the sacrifices they make. This is Leadership 101, folks, it's either the best stage-managed con job in political history (in which case the world's leaders would unite to kill him as fast as possible) or he's sure he's Right.

Guess which one the invaders' ruler, too scared of his people to allow them elections that are free of thumbscaling determinism, wants us all to believe. I think I'm finally understanding the Slavic concept of "the holy fool" (bozhevilyi in Ukrainian) the longer I stew over the facts of Zelenskyi's choice to stand in Putin's way. It's that real belief that the way will be made for that soul who simply does not accept the world's verdict about reality. Any sane person would've taken the ride offered to evacuate him, not demanded the weapons to fight, the invaders of a major army with a dictator at its head who needn't fear election losses or civil unrest unseating him. (It says here...watch this space.)

I will say I can't offer all five stars because, absence of footnotes and all, there's simply an overwhelming amount of detail to absorb and not a lot of framing to do it within. It's not possible to give that without a lot more history; that's not what this book's about; so it's a little unfair but I'm a reader-response reviewer not a literary critic. I'm resolutely anti-christian and find a lot of the apocalypticism around the battles of this war framed in Holy War terms unpleasantly alien, when I think the humanity on each side is more than capable of doing their worst of their own volition.

I could simply be not "getting" these references inside the proper framework. I acknowledge this...and still slice off the remaining bits of a fifth star. So four thoroughly impressed, urgently motivated "buy me now" stars.