An authoritative consideration of “dirty” gold’s grip on the environment and role in rampant geopolitical corruption.
A deep dive into a landmark U.S. prosecution of players in the transnational illicit gold trade.
The co-authors, all journalists who have worked at the Miami Herald, closely examine the grim, little-understood world of artisanal (small-scale) gold mining, rife with malfeasance, corruption, and ecological devastation, stretching from developing nations like Chile and Peru to Miami, where precious-metal conglomerates like Elemetal sought to dominate the gold market, particularly after the 2008 recession. The narrative follows a broad cast of businessmen, smugglers, and brokers, all of whom realized that shipping illicit Chilean gold through neighboring countries would enable ready sales to firms (Elemetal and others) using forged origin documents. The authors focus on the “three amigos,” macho, self-taught traders employed by Elemetal’s subsidiary, NTR Metals, who were eager to bend the rules and who tracked their smuggling and money laundering on phone apps, which later incriminated them. This misbegotten white-collar–crime story unfolds against a well-rendered historical background of how such activities have fractured the fragile environments and societies of developing nations in Latin America, where remote regions have been overrun by chaotic, destructive artisanal mining. “For Peruvian criminals,” write the authors, “gold had become far more lucrative than cocaine.” Eventually, however, the FBI and federal prosecutors built an in-depth prosecution of the scheme, endeavoring to “lay out a vivid portrait of illegal mining, gold smuggling, and money laundering across two continents, one that captured the widespread environmental damage to the Amazon rain forest and the powerful role of drug traffickers.” The authors write with a journalistic yet culturally attuned voice, but the narrative is sometimes repetitive in its frequent juxtaposition of the brutal conditions in the mine-ravaged rainforests with the wealth and colorful backstories of the key players as well as the determination and diligence of the various law enforcement agencies involved.
An authoritative consideration of “dirty” gold’s grip on the environment and role in rampant geopolitical corruption.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6290-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
TRUE CRIME | BUSINESS | WORLD | U.S. GOVERNMENT | WORLD | GENERAL BUSINESS
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 Yorker staff 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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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