MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)You will put down Gilded Rage in frustration if you hope for an account of Musk’s personal metamorphosis. This is a group portrait ... There are intriguing nuggets throughout ... The book is at its best when Silverman sketches a portrait of a specific, lesser-known character ... That is one of the pitfalls of a group portrait. You can easily leave the reader unsure where they stand as you throw them from one person to the next or, in Silverman’s case, from one person to the next and back, time and again, over the course of 330 pages. His tendency to do so robs his work of narrative propulsion, a flaw compounded by Silverman’s other tendency: to break the fourth wall with moralistic asides, undermining what is otherwise a dogged work of reporting ... Silverman, like many modern liberals, too often sees dark money and even darker elites behind every democratic decision he doesn’t like ... This sense, of Silverman adjudicating at a remove from the real action, pervades the book. There is a limit to how much of a story you can thread together from public records and freedom of information requests. The revelatory work to be done on these men and their aims will have to come from someone with access to them, or those around them. The wait for a literary executioner of tech’s gilded class goes on.
James Kaplan
RaveThe TImes (UK)Definitive ... Kaplan has written something broader and equally vital, marshalling with a light touch countless snippets of material to piece together a portrait of these three men and how they tilted jazz on its axis.
Michael Lewis
PanThe Times (UK)The fascinating story in Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’s long-awaited book on the accused crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried, isn’t that of SBF. It is the story of how Lewis, the best long-form journalistic writer of the past 20 years, fell for his protagonist and may have maimed his long-justified reputation in the process ... You might instead read Going Infinite in infinite expectation, as I did, that Lewis will turn the screw on Bankman-Fried. You will wait in vain. The action, such as it is, does not start until page 193 of a 254-page book ... On the whole, Lewis lacks the sort of scenes that made his previous books memorable ... Lewis, a vivid storyteller, paints a fascinating picture of Bankman-Fried, but he seems only to have seen one side of him: the side that dazzled the world.
