RaveAir MailI know more than I care to admit about this troubling and sorry saga. And yet, I can’t help but be utterly impressed by Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy, a bodice-ripping romp through even more of the gory details of the whole sordid affair, expertly reported and written by the very talented journalists James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams ... Their reporting chops are very much on display on nearly every page ... The depth of the multiple perversions, as revealed by the authors, is really quite astounding ... A breezy, gossipy, fast-paced read—a rocket ship from the get-go.
Barry Meier
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIn Spooked, the former New York Times investigative reporter Barry Meier makes clear he has some big and important ambitions: to probe deeply into the murky world of private spies ... In what feels like a curt 278 pages of text — as an investigative reporter, I craved a deeper dive — Meier focuses much of his narrative on the now-notorious \'Steele dossier,\' the elaborate handiwork of Christopher Steele, a former MI6 spy ... To paraphrase Anton Chekhov’s famous advice about storytelling: If you bring a gun to the first act, make sure it goes off by the last act ... With Spooked we are left, in the end, with a gun that doesn’t really go off.
Andrea Bernstein
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... ambitious ... Bernstein at her narrative best [is] reportorial, pointed and unsparing, while reinforcing her theme that the Trumps and the Kushners are ruthless, cold, power hungry and endlessly ambitious ... But it is also true that Bernstein has picked a most difficult topic to probe for new insights. So much has been written already about the Trumps and the Kushners — and not just in the four-plus years since Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower spewing vitriol and hate — that to add new material to that grotesque canon is an exceptionally challenging task for any reporter, even one as diligent as Bernstein. While American Oligarchs is a rich and highly readable compendium, one does not finish it and think, \'I’ve just been bedazzled and infuriated anew.\' Rather, the experience of consuming this book is more along the lines of reading an encyclopedia of many of the hateful things we already know, or think we know, about these two families ... I, for one, would have loved a far more detailed and anecdote-filled treatment of the Christie-Kushner feud, among others, than the one Bernstein provides.
James Freeman and Vern McKinley
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThe authors certainly would appear to have the credentials for a revelatory work of narrative nonfiction ... But Borrowed Time is not the book I was hoping it would be. It provides little new insight into what possessed Citigroup to go so far off the rails a decade ago and why it was not just allowed to dissolve like Lehman Brothers. Sure, Freeman and McKinley point out the important facts ... But none of this is explored in much detail, and what’s there feels rushed and perfunctory. The authors also ignore the low-hanging fruit of Citigroup whistle-blowers, like Richard Bowen and Sherry Hunt, who would have had plenty to say ... What about the sizable cast of characters that brought the bank to the brink of disaster in 2008? Surely not every one of them would have declined to be interviewed. If the book has any narrative tension, it is found in the authors’ interesting—but too quick—asides about their often unsuccessful efforts to pry supposedly public information about the bank out of its regulators ... leading Freeman and McKinley to the sound conclusion that it is \'easier to repeat history if the lessons of the past are erased.\' Colorful characters show up in Borrowed Time ... Freeman and McKinley also successfully make their point that Citigroup and its predecessors have repeatedly used their political connections to help the bank survive when it otherwise would have—should have—failed. But what remains largely unanswered is why everyone bothered to do it again in 2008.
David Enrich
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...a gripping narrative focused on Tom Hayes, a math whiz from a dysfunctional West London family who decides early on that he wants to work on Wall Street and make a lot of money ... His impressive reporting and writing chops are on full display in The Spider Network, a vastly expanded version of his original Journal series about the scandal. From the start, the book reads like a fast-paced John le Carré thriller, and never lets up ... To Enrich’s considerable credit, he does his very best to remain objective about the Libor scandal and Hayes’s principal role in causing it to happen. (It turned out the practice of manipulating Libor was more widespread than what Hayes and his various accomplices were doing.) But Enrich is human, and it’s clear that Hayes has captivated him. Not in a bad way, mind you, and not in a way that makes you question the accuracy of what is presented.
