A revealing work of financial reporting in a time of staggering inequality.
A gimlet-eyed look at the mega-skyscrapers that have been rising along New York’s Central Park.
The story of capital in the 21st century, writes Wall Street Journal reporter Clarke, is one of concentration in the hands of fewer and fewer people. As ever, many such people thrive on conspicuous consumption, and they find it in places such as One57, a massive city within a city that rose high in the Manhattan sky through the economic power of Saudi Arabian financiers. Other “copycat” structures have risen nearby, while predecessors have come and gone. One built by an aspirational developer named Harry Macklowe was an exercise in “amenity-rich luxury,” with a comfortable waiting lounge for chauffeurs, around-the-clock catering services, a huge indoor swimming pool, squash courts, and even a wine cellar where collectors could house their prized vintages. Interestingly, Clarke writes, the Billionaire’s Row of her title, which runs along 57th Street, was once “a schlocky patchwork,” the locus of theme restaurants such as the Hard Rock Café and the Motown Cafe. When those restaurants failed in the Great Recession, developers began to buy up comparatively inexpensive properties through financial mechanisms that skirted regulations via sources that “included everything from private equity and hedge funds to sovereign wealth funds and ultra-high-net-worth individuals.” Some developers made fortunes, while others went broke; some outfoxed Donald Trump along the way. If most architecture critics hated the newly remade street, so, too, did many ordinary New Yorkers, for whom “the skyboxes for billionaires were simultaneously an object of fascination and loathing.” Clarke notes that while New York has pale imitators in places like Austin and Miami, it is far from being the world center of superopulent, supersized buildings, lagging well behind any number of Asian cities and with no sign of catching up anytime soon.
A revealing work of financial reporting in a time of staggering inequality.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780593240069
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Currency
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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