Seductive ... Leaves the reader wanting to know more ... At moments Lewis seems so willing to let Bankman-Fried off the hook, even after Bankman-Fried was charged with fraud and money-laundering, for which he is on trial this week ... [A] vivid portrayal ... Lewis seems so deeply enmeshed in Bankman-Fried’s corner ... A more nuanced breakdown about what went wrong...would have bolstered Lewis’s book, which ends up focusing mostly on Bankman-Fried’s story and personality, and lacks some of the finer-grained financial analysis of Lewis’s previous books.
Strange ... You soon get the sense that Lewis felt unusually flummoxed by his material. Among the reliable pleasures offered by a Michael Lewis book are his formidable storytelling skills, his comic timing, his winsome confidence. He makes sure to give you an unsung hero to root for ... Bankman-Fried was supposed to be another hero in this vein ... Stubbornly credulous ... Bankman-Fried also seemed to be on an endless publicity tour, eager to sing to any journalist who was willing to listen. And Lewis listened. He offers the quirky portrait that is standard fare in his books ... Lewis seems so attached to the protagonist of his narrative that he takes an awful lot in stride ... Lewis is an undeniably talented writer, but the subject of Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t play to his strengths.
Well-timed, if unsatisfyingly convoluted, account of Bankman-Fried and the crypto businesses he built and tanked ... Lewis would seem to have found an ideal subject in Bankman-Fried ... Too often, though, Going Infinite is labyrinthine and downright arcane. Lewis doesn’t do his usual stellar job of explanatory journalism when it comes to the intricacies of cryptocurrencies.
