PositiveThe Minneapolis Star TribuneWall Street Journal reporters Tom Wright and Bradley Hope put the Dylan lyric in the frontispiece of their new book, Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood and the World. Nine chapters in, the reader learns how that whale — an insecure scion to a garment fortune named Jho Low — nabbed the first $700 million of about $7 billion he would steal from 1MDB, an investment fund of the Malaysian government, from 2009 to 2015. The sheer audacity of that first heist, Wright and Hope write, gave Low, who was in his late 20s at the time, access to more liquid money than anyone on the planet. He spent it gambling and partying in Las Vegas, buying art and properties, befriending celebrities and buying off business associates and politicians to keep his money train rolling ... Low will eventually be caught and tossed into an unpleasant Malaysian jail, leaving only one question in the telling of his story: Who’s going to play Leo in the movie version?
Bandi, Trans. by Deborah Smith
RaveThe Minneapolis StarDeborah Smith, whose translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, vividly brings to English the taut, searing stories. The tale of how the manuscript reached the free world, in two additional chapters, is harrowing itself ... Bandi is no Solzhenitsyn or Wiesel. But reading The Accusation is a much different experience from reading those literary masterworks. Each turn of the page, each moment of anger and sadness a reader feels for Bandi’s characters comes with a deeper ache.
