Cohan is nothing if not thorough, and Money to Burn is a coup of reporting ... In laying out this sordid saga, Cohan offers a lot of conflicting claims. It’s my one real gripe with this book: Cohan is so focused on allowing his subjects to have their say...that he delegates too much of the storytelling to them rather than forcefully shaping the narrative himself ... Setting this issue aside, Money to Burn is an engaging and valuable work, a portrait of a man and a milieu whose inexhaustible devotion to the accumulation of personal wealth may test your faith in capitalism.
Like eating a tub of candy for dinner, reading the nearly 700 pages of William Cohan’s Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the New Wall Street leaves you fatigued, stuffed and still hungry. Yet some of the book’s most satisfying insights come in its final eight pages ... Doesn’t seem particularly interested in exploring the questions it raises ... Many filibusters, digressions and asides ... Rarely knits a narrative showing Apollo people in action. We mainly hear them in overlong interview excerpts that are often confirmatory and confoundingly repetitive.
Cohan’s ear for dialogue is pitch perfect ... Some of the claims made against Black by women associated with Epstein are almost too painful to read ... Black co-operated with Cohan, giving him access to documents as well as long interviews, to try to restore his reputation. Does he succeed? The four types of reader may well come to different conclusions.
