MixedSlateThe Chickenshit Club is an admirably lucid, nuanced book about the tangle of complicated changes that, over the past decade or so, converged to make the DOJ less bold and less capable in its pursuit of corporate criminals ... As much as I was learning, I wanted to feel more like I was inside Eisinger’s head, following along with his thought process as he reported out his story and got to know and understand its main characters. More than that, I wanted him to show me the buildup of the passion that fuels his book—how he came to believe in the ideas he argues for in it and how he learned the system well enough to authoritatively evaluate its breakdown ... It’s no insult to Eisinger’s explanatory powers to say that the financial crimes he describes in the book are extremely hard to grasp...One way Eisinger could have compensated for the opacity of white-collar crime—one way he could have made the more confusing parts of the narrative more viscerally bracing—would have been to insert himself more into the story...having a little more Jesse Eisinger in The Chickenshit Club would have made the book more accessible. It could have also created room for Eisinger to engage in a less inert, more discursive mode as he felt his way toward the truth.
