Timely and provocative reading on one of the many perils of the murky private equity world.
Two Wall Street Journal reporters demonstrate how a charismatic but crooked businessman conned elite investors into believing they could profit from doing good for the globally dispossessed.
Until he was accused of misappropriating funds in 2018, Pakistani-born Arif Naqvi, founder of the Abraaj Group, was a celebrated private equity tycoon. In this expansion of their investigation for the WSJ, Clark and Louch—who gathered information from “more than 150 people, including 70 former Abraaj employees, business chiefs, politicians and a Vatican cardinal”—chart Naqvi’s breathtaking rise to prominence and his even more stupendous fall from grace. The authors depict the young Naqvi as an exceptionally talented student of modest means whose “priority was to get rich.” The more ruthless side of his personality began to emerge in his young professional days. A real estate developer in Pakistan, one of his first bosses, noted Naqvi’s extreme ego and ambition and willingness to take problematic risks with debt. These traits served him well in his days as an independent fundraiser and dealmaker in Dubai and led him to form the relationships that led to the creation of Abraaj in 2002. The company quickly began making huge profits in developing countries that Naqvi marketed to Western investors and academics as “places of excitement and opportunity.” For the next 15 years, banks, philanthropists, and a host of foreign governments—including those of the U.S. and Britain—entrusted Abraaj with spectacular sums meant to fund socially conscious projects (such as the rescue of the perennially failing Karachi Electric company) that Naqvi surreptitiously used to “keep his billionaire lifestyle afloat.” As his fame grew, so did his darker tendencies, which manifested as significant abuses of corporate power. Compelling and disturbing, the book is a pointed tale of hubris, greed, and the narrow limits of so-called capitalistic “benevolence” in the era of growing economic inequality.
Timely and provocative reading on one of the many perils of the murky private equity world.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-299621-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A thimbleful of fresh content lies buried in tales familiar and often told.
Beatlemania meets autopsy in the latest product from the Patterson factory.
The authors take more than half the book to reach John Lennon’s final days, which passed 40 years ago—an anniversary that, one presumes, provides the occasion for it. The narrative opens with killer Mark David Chapman talking to himself: “It’s like I’m invisible.” And how do we know that Chapman thought such a thing? Well, the authors aver, they’re reconstructing the voices in his head and other conversations “based on available third-party sources and interviews.” It’s a dubious exercise, and it doesn’t get better with noir-ish formulas (“His mind is a dangerous neighborhood”) and clunky novelistic stretches (“John Lennon wakes up, reaches for his eyeglasses. At first the day seems like any other until he realizes it’s a special one….He picks up the kitchen phone to greet his old songwriting partner, who’s called to wish him all the best for the record launch”). In the first half of the book, Patterson and company reheat the Beatles’ origin story and its many well-worn tropes, all of which fans already know in detail. Allowing for the internal monologue, things improve somewhat once the narrative approaches Chapman’s deranged act—300-odd pages in, leaving about 50 pages for a swift-moving account of the murder and its aftermath, which ends with Chapman in a maximum-security cell where “he will be protected from the ugliness of the outside world….The cell door slides shut and locks. Mark David Chapman smiles. I’m home.” To their credit, the authors at least don’t blame Lennon’s “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” for egging on the violence that killed him, but this book pales in comparison to Kenneth Womack’s John Lennon 1980 and Philip Norman’s John Lennon: The Life, among many other tomes on the Fab Four.
A thimbleful of fresh content lies buried in tales familiar and often told.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-42906-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2021
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...
A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.
In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85782-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
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