I am now reading two books simultaneously. Every time I sit down to read, it’s a struggle: which one should I pick up?
They’re both really interesting for one reason: they follow the money.
Title: Inside the red mansion : on the trail of China’s most wanted man
Author: Oliver August
Imprint: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 2007.
Oliver August’s book is a well-crafted and compelling non-fiction narrative that traces the author’s search for a fugitive tycoon in China. To find the man, August, in essence, follows his money. He goes to the homes he bought, the clubs where he drank, and the skyscrapers he built. Sometime memoir, sometime suspense novel, the book sheds light on the nature of money and money-making in China.
Title: Asian Godfathers
Author: Joe Studwell
Imprint: London : Profile, 2007.
Studwell’s is more academic work (but don’t worry — it’s very readable) that investigates the tycoons of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, in depth and in detail. Southeast Asia, for not being the richest part of the world, nor the biggest, has an inordinate number of the world’s richest people, he begins. Who are they? How did they get so rich? And where did they get all that money? These are the questions he has investigated, including some very interesting but not often discussed aspects of Singapore’s economy (see pages 34 and 35 of Chapter 1, for and early example).
Both authors are seasoned journalists — August is a generalist, the Beijing bureau chief for The Times of London, and Studwell is the editor of the respected financial magazine, the China Economic Quarterly. They are both great storytellers and pack in lots of facts without making the reader (me) feel overloaded. They both shed new light on things that I thought I was already familiar with. They are both very difficult to put down.
The question is, which one should I put down first?
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