THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi

by Ronald Kessler ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 1986

A trashy pop bio of Khashoggi, probably the wealthiest and certainly the most flamboyant of the Middle Easterners who work at the agent's shadowy trade. An investigative journalist on leave from the Washington Post, Kessler (The Life Insurance Game, 1985) reports having interviewed 140 sources and pored over thousands of documents to get his Khashoggi story. Perhaps so, but the sketchy dossier he offers exhibits precious little evidence of productive probing. At any rate, his cursory coverage of Khashoggi's privileged childhood in Saudi Arabia (his father was an attending physician to the royal family) and young manhood as a two-time college dropout in California recycles at least a couple of yarns included in Robert Lacey's The Kingdom (1982). Nor does the author add much to the publicly available record in his short, disjointed takes on the merchant statesman's lucrative career as a go-between, arms dealer, influence peddler, entrepreneur, and pander extraordinaire. Kessler, however, succeeds all too well in logging Khashoggi's flair for sleazier forms of conspicuous consumption. In fact, the book opens with a lengthy account of an exercise in wretched excess--the 50th birthday AK threw himself at his Marbella estate last July. Subsequently, separate chapters are devoted to the tycoon's jetliners, yachts, and homes. There's little that's discreet or even contemporaneously acceptable in the muddled text's constant allusions to Khashoggi's kinky sexual preferences and bent for whoremongering. The more graceless fanzine barbs, though, seem reserved for the women in his life, e.g., ""Everything about (Soraya), including her chest, seemed larger than life."" Equally troublesome is the likelihood Kessler is beyond his depth at many points in the narrative. By way of example, the ascendance of Jomo Kenyatta (whom Khashoggi met in 1976) is summarized as follows: ""With his gift for oratory, he rose within the government from clerk to president when Kenya won independence from Great Britain in 1963."" On three occasions, Kessler is at pains to point out that the rotund Khashoggi was the model for the hero of a potboiler novel by his friend Harold Robbins. He was ill advised to invite comparison--The Pirate is by far the better book.

Pub Date: June 19, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Warner

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION