A pertinent, timely tale of financial fraud and how it was maintained for so long.
Ivar Kreuger, known to aficionados of fraud cases as “the Match King,” flourished 80 years ago. As this latest biography shows, his complex schemes could have occurred just yesterday—or might again tomorrow.
Partnoy (Law/Univ. of San Diego; Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets, 2003, etc.) traces the fabulous rise and spectacular fall of the financier. Once counted among the wealthiest men on earth, Kreuger charmed royalty, tycoons and reporters, as well as Greta Garbo and Herbert Hoover. Along with dubious secret enterprises, he ran some legitimate businesses, including mining, construction and the manufacture of much of the world’s matchsticks, financing sovereign governments in exchange for match monopolies. With fancy, arcane footwork, Krueger embellished real deals with shady transactions involving many of his dozens of affiliated firms. Money flowed from Wall Street to Stockholm, the Netherlands to Poland with scant documentation. He booked false gains to pay consistent 25 percent dividends. He kept real liabilities off balance sheets. Politicians, investors, brokers and bankers—with the notable exception of J.P. Morgan—were pleased to join the fun, no questions asked. It all unraveled in 1932 when Kreuger committed suicide and his transgressions were exposed. Estimates of losses vary, notes Partnoy, but millions worldwide were bankrupted. The author assiduously parses the data and pays special attention to the way Kreuger’s American accountant was hustled. He also emphasizes that, despite clear deceit and a touch of forgery, the Match King wasn’t entirely bad. After all, he made real money with a few real businesses.
A pertinent, timely tale of financial fraud and how it was maintained for so long.Pub Date: May 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-743-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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