The Money Kings

Very surprising to me that Mother Jones writer Schulman could write such a boring book, at least the first third of it. This is another book that is made fat with needless pages because of the refusal to use pictures and diagrams. Family Trees would’ve been amazingly helpful For keeping the people sorted out, and Trees illustrating the corporate mergers among all the Banking entities would have spared us readers many, many paragraphs and confusion about who we were reading about. Imagine trying to solve a crossword puzzle where you only have the clues in words and you don’t have a graphic showing where the blanks are and where the dead squares are. That’s what much of this book is like. There’s some fascinating material in there but it’s really hard to access and keep organized in your mind.

When they do the post-Mortem on printed books and why people stopped reading them in printed form, this book will be discussed. I usually prefer printed books, but this is one where I kept wanting to have access to Wikipedia and other resources to try to fill the gaps in the presentation of this material. The biggest problem is that the book is really about one particular banker, Schiff, and that’s when the book starts to pick up and get a lot more interesting. It ends very strongly In the chapters about the gross antisemitism of the Gilded Age, and the rise of Hitler in Germany. If the author had simply focused the book on the story of Schiff from the start, much of the rest could’ve been told in digressions, and then backstory in a much more comprehensible and interesting way.