About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Richard Behar
Positive Air Mail At this late date, does anyone care? To Behar’s great credit, given how endlessly and skillfully Madoff has been chronicled, he does pull off some feats of reporting and thinking that make the book a valuable addition to the Madoff pantheon ... Behar seems to have gotten exhausted by the endlessness, and perhaps fruitlessness, of his quest, and his exhaustion makes readers exhausted, too. He begins to quote endlessly from transcripts of his interviews, and to get lost in the minutiae of courtroom details, sure signs of a writer who has gotten desperate ... While his book might be the final word—let’s hope so—even Behar can’t answer some of the questions he raises.
Rob Copeland
Positive Air Mail Devastating ... The book is full of delectably awful anecdotes about how badly people behave in such a culture.
Angel Au-Yeung
Rave Air Mail A compelling and tragic story, but it’s also more than that. The authors pose questions that reverberate beyond Hsieh’s life. Are entrepreneurs more subject to mental-health problems than the average population?
Scott Higham
Mixed Washington Post In part because the end of the story has yet to be written, the book is less satisfying than it could be...In addition, the writing often bogs down in a morass of detail...Too often, Higham and Horwitz transcribe courtroom exchanges word for word for page after page instead of stepping back and explaining why one particular exchange might be pivotal...You won’t come out of the book with a clear sense of where things stand or why, or which of the industry’s arguments has mattered most in the eyes of the law...But you will come away with a renewed appreciation for all that money can buy, as well as another realization that is also as obvious as it is shocking: No one is ever going to say they’re sorry.
Sebastian Mallaby
Rave The Washington Post Mallaby’s angle is fresh. Most people who write about Silicon Valley do so from the viewpoint of entrepreneurs who built companies with the backing of venture capitalists. Mallaby writes from the perspective of the venture capitalists themselves. He tells his story through an accumulation of smaller stories, each one phenomenally detailed and engaging. In so doing, he’s written a book that is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand modern-day Silicon Valley and even our economy writ large ... Mallaby makes good points. He caused me to question some of my skepticism about venture capital.
Patrick Radden Keefe
Positive Air Mail It made me understand that one kind of carelessness can be born of great wealth—but another kind can be born of great conviction. In addition to being a Shakespearean tale of human nature, Empire of Pain offers several lessons about our world ... His book is a testament to the power of the deep document dive, to the importance of talking to that \'category of employee who might have seemed almost invisible to the family,\' from housekeepers to doormen. That kind of journalism remains the reason why even the greatest of fortunes can’t buy the one thing its heirs want most: secrecy.
Susan Berfield
Positive The Washington Post ... wonderfully detailed ... [Berfield\'s] story is about the past but also very much about the present, as our own Gilded Age raises old questions about inequality, plutocracy and what Roosevelt once called \'that most dangerous of all classes, the wealthy criminal class\' ... Berfield obviously did an extraordinary amount of research, and she draws heavily on documentary evidence to paint detailed pictures. This sometimes comes at the expense of clarity. I found myself reading a Wikipedia entry on the creation of Northern Securities to sort out what had transpired...It’s a tangent that doesn’t go anywhere and diverts from the drama of the strike ... And the book may make you both sad and mad, because it serves as a poignant, painful reminder of what a real leader does.
Nicholas Shaxson
Mixed The Washington Post ... especially in this uncertain, insecure climate, the thesis is important and worth repeating ... Correlation is one thing, and causation another. Shaxson doesn’t prove the latter. But he makes some provocative arguments ... Shaxson also makes one of those wonderful points that is so insightful, it seems obvious in retrospect ... Shaxson also is obsessed with offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands. His obsession might be to the detriment of this particular book ... tossing in unsavory characters who may or may not be figments of his imagination, along with random and unprovable references to possible criminality, only muddies the issue ... Shaxson has some simple, lovely lines...But for the most part, he prefers to bounce quickly from one scandal to another and to pile on descriptors ... It’s exhausting. More important, it loses the reader who is looking for clear analysis, rather than fevered rhetoric, the reader who wants to be shown how it is, rather than told how it is. And so, while Shaxson’s book grapples with one of the most critical economic issues of our day, he ultimately may not convince anyone who doesn’t already agree.
James O'Toole
Positive The Washington Post \"... a timely work ... While [O’Toole\'s] book is not an easy read — he has never met a detail he doesn’t like — it offers important insight, especially for anyone who thinks the kind of change we seem to want will be easy.\
Anand Giridharadas
Mixed The Washington Post Winners Take All is so readable because it is told through characters ... Giridharadas isn’t just raising questions. He’s come to big conclusions: that MarketWorld, along with its philosophical antecedents, like Carnegie-ism and neoliberalism...has been an abject failure. To prove his point, he doesn’t engage in any specific analysis. In fact, he doesn’t even mention, let alone examine, what is arguably MarketWorld’s most powerful and influential actor: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As big-picture proof of the failure of the status quo, Giridharadas cites his indebtedness to Thomas Piketty’s \'masterpiece\' on the growth of inequality, Capital in the Twenty First Century. He argues that any thesis that the world has actually improved over the course of human history is simply a form of brainwashing ... For readers who are cynical about the private sector but also versed enough in history to be cynical about governments, the book would have been more powerful if Giridharadas had stayed within his definition of an old-school public intellectual: someone who is willing to throw bombs at the current state of affairs, but lacks the arrogance and self-righteousness that comes with believing you have the solution.
Tyler Cowen
Mixed The Washington Post As fascinating as Cowen’s analysis can be, his grand thesis is ultimately unconvincing. I had a hard time understanding who exactly composes the complacent class. Initially, Cowen argues that the entire country is complacent, that despite the huge divisions of race and income in America, we are all 'more or less OK with this division of the spoils.' Can this be right? I wanted Cowen to offer some evidence, but I was hard-pressed to find it other than in Cowen’s assertions. Throughout the book, he redefines who it is he’s calling complacent ... Partly because Cowen isn’t clear as to who the complacent class is, it’s also not always clear that his data supports his thesis ... In the end, his point might be that some of us are complacent about certain aspects of life, and while there might be some benefits to this, there are also dangers lurking. Which makes for a book that accomplishes the laudable goal of making you think, if not one that delivers on its title.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Pan The Washington Post Early in the book, Stiglitz writes that he made a decision not to recount the birth of the euro, which is a shame, because this story is crying out for narrative, characters and nuance. Instead, Stiglitz has written a polemic, one that reads like a series of loosely stitched-together lectures ... Another downside to his style is that it strips the humanity out of the story.