The boots haunted him. Thirty-two hundred of them tromping in formation down a narrow dirt road that ran between swamps and through pine barrens three miles outside of Wilmington, North Carolina, their percussion pounding into the earth as 1,600 American Colored Troops advanced into the enemy fire guarding Wilmington.

We asked Maureen Farrell ’01 about The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion (Crown), which she cowrote with Eliot Brown—the saga of the rise and fall of one of the most-valuable and most-hyped start-ups and its unusual leader.

Duke Magazine: What struck me in this book is that there’s something about the idea of a visionary that really captures people and that was a big driver in this story.