A provocative view of the grift from inside the grifters’ unenviable world.
In which Miss Lonelyhearts makes her (no, his) home in Lagos.
It’s a fixture of the evening news: Someone falls for a charming stranger from somewhere far away, perhaps serving in the military in Iraq or a widow in Manila, and is bilked out of his or her retirement account. Spanish journalist Barragán’s own mother fell for one such fraudster, who was supposedly going to “ship her some bars of solid gold he found in a terrorist stash.” Barragán learns that the losses to romance scams amounted, in 2022 alone, to $1.3 billion. But hitting the road and heading to Nigeria, an epicenter, he finds that most of the scams are committed by young men who, usually posing as women, target victims with long-distance blandishments. They have good reason for this, a critical but empathetic Barragán writes: Corruption is endemic, and jobs few in Nigeria. He writes of a principal informant: “Biggy seemed like any depressed young man facing the possibility that his life would amount to nothing.” The culture of these “Yahoo Boys” surely seems a slow death of despair, built on drink and endless drugs, consumed, Barragán hazards, “to avoid thinking too much about what they were doing.” It’s not crime alone that’s epidemic in Barragán’s account—the loneliness of modern life, reckoned by the U.N. to constitute a world health crisis, feeds into the hands of the scammers. After living in their world, which is not without some self-awareness, he writes of the Yahoo Boys (and occasional young woman), “I was beginning to understand that scammers grasped our loneliness better than most people. Certainly better than I did.” There’s much description but little prescription here—no solution to any of the broad-ranging social problems that feed into the romance-scam syndrome. All the same, it’s an interesting inquiry.
A provocative view of the grift from inside the grifters’ unenviable world.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9780374609306
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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