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BILLION DOLLAR WHALE

Name: BILLION DOLLAR WHALE
Author: Tom Wright
ISBN: 978-0-316-43650-2

THE MAN WHO FOOLED WALL STREET, HOLLYWOOD, AND THE WORLD

by Tom Wright & Bradley Hope ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2018

As the authors amply prove, the scandal reaches far beyond Low. To succeed, he relied on the naiveté, greed, and generally...

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Wall Street Journal reporters Wright and Hope tell the story of a massive international financial scandal they initially exposed in the newspaper in 2015, reporting that made them finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.

The fraud centers on one man, Malaysian-born Jho Low, who by age 20 had begun figuring out how lies about his own background, combined with careful study of international financial markets, could enrich him. By age 30, Low had fooled even sophisticated international bankers into investing billions of dollars into fraudulent companies he created. Much of the book is set in the United States, where Low attended college, resided part-time, and identified his credulous marks, which included dealmakers at the mammoth Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs, among many others. Many American readers will not have a solid background in Malaysian affairs; a strength of this account is the authors’ explication of how Malaysian culture and politics helped enable Low to carry out his schemes. The “whale” of the title is slang for a high-rolling gambler, an apt description of Low. He did not gamble with his own money, however. Instead, he used billions of dollars raised from corrupt governments and wealthy individual investors to finance his lavish lifestyle, which the authors describe meticulously. The partying included celebrities from around the globe, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Paris Hilton, fashion models, and Kanye West and other hip-hop stars. A major irony documented by the authors was the creation of a movie studio by Low using stolen cash; the studio would produce the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, based on the memoir by financial fraudster Jordan Belfort. Despite all the evidence against him, the question remains: “Will Low ever be brought to justice?”

As the authors amply prove, the scandal reaches far beyond Low. To succeed, he relied on the naiveté, greed, and generally immoral conduct of huge banks as well as corrupt governments.

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-43650-2

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Hachette

Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
BLACKBIRD
by Tom Wright

- BOOK REVIEW
WHAT DIES IN SUMMER
by Tom Wright

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.