I love my nephews and niece dearly. Their mother is mostly alright (very lib, and makes questionable choices, but a million times better than what we were raised like). The dad however.... without going into specifics, has some mental issues and made some awful choices (landing in jail for several years regarding fraudulent business practices), and now that he's out, seems to be doing similar things again (whether this will come to bite him in the ass again, i don't know). Sister and the guy are no longer married, but he takes the kids every weekend.
The oldest nephew is a bro. Is really into hockey, and is taking after his dad in some ways regarding an interest in 'business' and 'investing' (dad was in jail for ponzi style fraud). while it may be just a phase, I'm concerned that between the dad's influence, and being left to his own devices, he could go down investment/business bro chud pipeline. The mother is in the camp of 'whatever he does with his dad is not my business, and i believe he will make good choices'. I would like to try to take more of a proactive role. we don't talk or see each other a lot since we live pretty far away, and he's in the moody-teen 'i don't really want to respond to anyone in full sentences' phase, but all the kids love when i send books. I would love to have a better relationship with him (and all of them) but not being around makes it really difficult to formulate a more casual relationship where we could really explore a lot of his interests and talk about them.
so my question, do you know of any 'motivational' or 'business' or 'entrepreneurship' books that are not chuddy, or could open up ideas of alternatives to that model. He seems to be pretty materialistic, but primarily because his dad is obsessed with the 'perfect image' 'extravagant life' (he was like this before he went to jail, and is the reason he was incarcerated). I tried giving him some even 'basic' philosophically leaning novels, at least to try to get his brain moving a little more critically, but he's really just interested in business and sports...
tl;dr book suggestions for a 15 year old boy to slow down/divert business bro attitude...
I haven't read it, but Richard Wolff suggested 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang. I don't know if this is something a 15 year old can read through, but as he gets older this might help, along with introducing him to Richard Wolff's lectures.