A rambling but sometimes on-target critique of kleptocratic public- and private-sector elites.
A former senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace deplores America’s willingness to ignore homegrown corruption that undermines democracy.
Anyone who has followed the outbreaks of COVID-19 at U.S. meatpacking plants may find one fact in this book especially chilling: In the anti-regulatory spirit of the Trump administration, the Department of Agriculture levied on such facilities one-tenth of the fines in 2018 that it had imposed in 2013 for rules violations. Chayes casts the slashed penalties as evidence of an alarming trend: America is turning a blind eye to the corruption of kleptocratic elites who—with an audacity unseen since the Gilded Age—enrich themselves through public- and private-sector (if not outright criminal) alliances. In an intermittently enlightening but digressive mix of history, analysis, and polemic, the author shows how the fat cats consolidate their power partly by shuttling among jobs at universities, government or nonprofit agencies, and corporations or top-tier law firms like Jones Day and Kirkland & Ellis. Moving from John D. Rockefeller’s era to the present, Chayes serves up some piquant details and anecdotes—e.g., one involving Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s clerkship for Anthony Kennedy: “This is the same Justice Kennedy whose son Justin was President Trump’s loan officer at Deutsche Bank, and whose early retirement gave Trump a surprise Supreme Court slot to fill.” Much of the story of how the U.S. sank into this ethics maw has been told before—see Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, and Zephyr Teachout’s Corruption in America—and Chayes’ effort to update the tale belabors metaphors from the Bible and Greek mythology and wanders far afield to Nigeria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Ultimately, however, this book supports the view of a federal prosecutor who told Chayes that today, “only bad criminals can get convicted”: “And I don’t mean dangerous criminals. I mean people who are just really bad at being corrupt.”
A rambling but sometimes on-target critique of kleptocratic public- and private-sector elites.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65485-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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