A capable, eye-opening account of laissez faire financial laws and practices that serve the interest of criminals alone.
A revealing look at the web of financial chicanery that puts the U.S. at the head of places in which to hide ill-gotten gains.
Where to go when you’ve robbed your citizens blind or sold a boatload of Fentanyl? Not Turks and Caicos or Liberia or Bermuda: No, the thing to do is cultivate the right kinds of allies, financial and political, in the U.S., and voilà, money laundered and riches secured. Financial journalist Michel serves up his first exhibit: Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue, a son of the murderous Equatorial Guinean dictator, who spent mountains of his compatriots’ money on mansions and, in time, Michael Jackson collectibles even as those compatriots starved. His vast fortune was not technically illegal, owing to laws his father promulgated. As Michel chronicles, to protect it, Teodorin went to “a country that had perfected the biggest system of transforming dirty, suspect money into perfectly legitimate finances and assets, obscuring its illicit origins in the process.” That’d be the U.S., where Ukrainian crime lords, Colombian cartel leaders, and their ilk have found a welcome haven. Criminal cash was ever more welcome with the presidency of Donald Trump, whose “efforts to dismantle America’s anticorruption program took place almost as soon as he entered the White House.” The author shows how Trump figured out all kinds of ways to skim the flood of illegal cash that flowed into the country—e.g., selling one of his Trump Tower apartments to the daughter of another African dictator who, like most of Trump’s business associates, operated behind a shell corporation. Michel’s diligent dissection is maddening to read, all the more so when he recounts how nonprofits and universities flock to accept dirty money in exchange for bestowing legitimacy on donors. Happily, since Biden came into office, the tide has turned, but the kleptocracy of which Michel writes, which “can be understood…as capitalism as its worst,” will be difficult to uproot.
A capable, eye-opening account of laissez faire financial laws and practices that serve the interest of criminals alone.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-27452-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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