A close look at a very rich family

[Wiregrass Willie]

I have just finished a really good true crime book. It's by Joe McGinniss -- one of the best writers of that genre.

Never Enough -- Simon and Shuster 2007.

True crime is my favorite reading for relaxation but it's not the story of the crime that fascinates me about this book. McGinniss has managed to show us how the super rich live -- and their attitudes toward those of us who are not rich. And it's not a pretty picture.

Robert Kissel is an investment banker for Merrill Lynch stationed in Hong Kong. On page 30, McGinniss quotes another author in describing what an investment banker is :

In his splendid novel A Ship Made of Paper, Scott Spencer describes the breed. He writes that in lieu of happiness they experience "the grim, burnt comfort of' thriving in a world that is, for the most part. brutal and uninhabitable:" The investment banker, Spencer writes, "spends the best part of nearly every day surrounded by people who make money not houses, or soup, not steel, not songs, only money, and who quite openly will do anything for financial gain.... He has made an alliance with these squandered souls, these are his people, his teammates and among them he feels the pride of the damned.

After finishing this book I can only conclude that Mr. Spencer was very soft on the breed.

McGinniss describes the main character -- Robert Kissel -- like this on page 162:

Rob had become a Republican almost as soon as he'd become an investment banker-two sides of the same coin was how he viewed it-and he held the entire Bush family in high esteem. The Bushes knew how to make money and they knew how to spend it to buy power, two of' the skills he most admired. In addition, Prescott Sheldon Bush, father of George H. W Bush and grandfather of current president George W Bush, had been a significant investment banker in his time.

And Rob wasn't the sort of Jew who fretted about the foundation of the Bush fortune. As a director of both Brown Brothers Harriman and the Union Banking Company, whose assets were seized by the United States government in 1942 under a trafficking with the enemy law, Prescott S. Bush had invested both for and in German companies known to be aiding and abetting the Nazi Party.

The story (secondary to me) is about how Kissel's wife finds love with a guy who is a resident of a New England trailer park and decided to end her marriage in a way that will cost her the least money.

One comment I will make is that the story has a happy ending. The banker is murdered.

The only thing I don't like about the book is that the publisher has chosen to double space the text of the 355 page book. Why ? I don't know but it made it less easy for me to read.

[graywarrior]

1. THE LAST BROTHER THE RISE AND FALL OF TEDDY KENNEDY

Amazing book written by Joe.

[Wiregrass Willie]

3. Referred to his daughter in law of 12 years as "the waitress".

Her family was millionares but were not super rich. She worked as a waitress when she met Rob. Rob's father appears to have thought they were poor white trash.

[ret5hd]

2. What was the most denigrating thing said of the common folk?

[Wiregrass Willie]

4. I'm sorry. Posted reply to above