It’s a story that requires lots of insider information of its own kind to write, and Kolhatkar handles the job well though...
A formulaic but still intriguing financial cops-and-robbers story.
Billionaire Steven Cohen (b. 1956) was a perfect fit at Wharton, its culture “driven by the worship of money.” Brilliant and driven, he was a perfect fit on Wall Street, where, in the 1970s, he became a pioneer of a certain kind of hedge fund, making millions every year right out of the gate. The time was perfect, too, in a deregulated Reagan-era financial market that thought nothing of risk and even less of the law. Cohen’s methods hinged, writes New Yorker staffer and financial-industry veteran Kolhatkar, on the accumulation of huge amounts of information—much of it along the “gray” edge, much more of it deep into black territory, “information that was obviously illegal,” the stuff on which insider-trading convictions hang. By the author’s account, Cohen is emphatically not a nice guy; she writes of how he skillfully hid assets during a divorce and of his tyrannizing employees: “For traders, getting a job at SAC was like pulling the pin out of a grenade: It wasn’t a question of if you would blow up, it was a matter of when.” It was also not a question of if the authorities would eventually catch up, and here Kolhatkar’s tale assumes a certain inevitability, with good but indifferently socialized investigators, forensic accountants, and informants chasing after enough hard evidence to put an end to Cohen’s manipulations. The upshot of the book is an inevitability of another kind, perhaps: although the punishment leveled at Cohen was astonishing on paper—close to $2 billion—it brought a nonapology by way of apology (“we greatly regret this conduct occurred”), and Cohen is preparing to resume his activities on the trading floor.
It’s a story that requires lots of insider information of its own kind to write, and Kolhatkar handles the job well though without the narrative flair of Michael Lewis’ kindred book Flash Boys.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9580-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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