A thrilling remembrance by a fighter of white-collar crime.
A writer recounts his spectacular Canadian lottery win and the avalanche of grief it brought him.
Debut author Rush’s life was completely transformed in an instant when he won the lottery, a windfall of 50 million Canadian dollars tax free. It took him about a “nanosecond” to quit his job, and he quickly celebrated with some carefree spending, including getting two brand new sports cars. Rush was contacted by Jeremy, the son of one of his most trusted friends, David, with a business proposition: He asked for a $5 million investment in social media software that promised to be the next Facebook. Jeremy “radiated success,” and his “strong, charismatic personality” made him appear like a “visionary on a mission.” The author was convinced and parted with $4.6 million, but he soon began to have doubts. According to Rush, Jeremy was inclined to purchase ludicrously luxurious items and was suspiciously comfortable cutting legal corners. The author contends that he discovered that Jeremy’s business proposal was more hype than promise and that he bamboozled him out of millions, all with the help of David, who was once a spiritual mentor to Rush. The author energetically chronicles his progressively sickening realizations—Jeremy was not a newcomer to fraud and left behind him a “trail of devastated victims.” Rush eventually made it his mission to “take down” white-collar crime. The author’s prose is lucidly informal—it reads like a lament delivered to a friend over drinks. He’s also impressively candid—he admits that the money brought far more sorrow than contentment. Ultimately, he was compelled to ruminate about what he wanted in life, the real gift of the lottery win: “How much was enough? How much did I really need?” The minute details of a court battle with Jeremy that raged on for eight months are likely to exhaust readers. But overall, the book is a gripping story full of greed, astonishing naiveté, and thoughtful reflections.
A thrilling remembrance by a fighter of white-collar crime.Pub Date: June 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9992524-0-3
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Rantanna Media Inc
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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