wall street journal book review 2023

19 books to read in 2023 to think like a Wall Street investor

• In 2023 markets may be plagued by ongoing inflation and recessionary fears.
• We asked experts for their essential reads heading into a new year filled with uncertainty.
• Here are the 19 books to read in 2023 to help you make smart investment decisions.

After a year of floundering returns and whiplash from highly volatile markets, it's no surprise that most investors are eager to turn the page into a new year.

But looking ahead, 2023 may be very similar to the current macroeconomic environment characterized by a brewing recession , sticky inflation, and plunging equities.

Still, that doesn't mean all hope is lost. In every economic cycle there's always opportunities to make money — if investors know where to look.

Insider asked a number of veteran Wall Street investors which books they're reading or most looking forward to reading in the new year to shed some light on their investing strategies and how they plan to cope with ongoing economic uncertainty. Here are their responses.

1. "21st Century Monetary Policy: The Federal Reserve from the Great Inflation to COVID-19" by Ben Bernanke

Recommended by: David Souccar, portfolio manager at Vontobel Asset Management

In this book, former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke walks readers through the history of the US central bank, giving a behind-the-scenes look at key monetary policy decisions — and their resulting repercussions — during his tenure there.

"A helpful book to understand the challenge the Fed is facing in its current battle against inflation," said David Souccar, a portfolio manager at Vontobel Asset Management.

2. "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology" by Chris Miller

Recommended by: David Souccar

Over the past two years, pandemic-induced bottlenecks have squeezed global supply chains and led to a shortage in the production of semiconductor chips, a critical component for many electronics and appliances. In "Chip War," author Chris Miller details how intense foreign competition from countries like China has placed immense pressure on the US's title as the world's leading manufacturer of semiconductor chips — effectively showcasing the US-China struggle for dominance on a new stage.

3. "The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence" by Robert J. Samuelson

Recommended by: Jason Pride, chief investment officer of private wealth at Glenmede

Robert J. Samuelson's "The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath" provides a detailed look at the high inflation that characterized the US economy in the 1970s and 1980s, which investors can draw many parallels from today. While the conclusion of this period led to an era of uninterrupted economic growth, Samuelson argues that it also indirectly contributed to the 2008 financial crisis by giving Americans recency bias.

"In order to understand 2022, the rise in inflation, and the potential paths forward, it is important to know — in depth — the pattern of the inflation cycle of that time. That includes the causes; the responses of government, business, and consumers; their mistakes that prolonged the cycle; and their later actions that finally brought it to an end," said Jason Pride, chief investment officer of private wealth at Glenmede.

4. "The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times" by Michelle Obama

Recommended by: Priya Misra, head of global rates strategy at TD Securities

In Michelle Obama's newest book, the lawyer and former first lady shares her insights on how to move forward when unforeseen challenges or obstacles arise.

"It talks about how to stay true to oneself and stay balanced in the face of uncertainty," said TD Securities' head of global rates strategy Priya Misra. "2022 was a reminder of how uncertain life can be."

5. "The Lion Tracker's Guide To Life" by Boyd Varty

Recommended by: Brian Ferguson, portfolio manager at BNY Mellon

While this book may be somewhat off the beaten path, portfolio manager Brian Ferguson told Insider that many of his investment insights nowadays come from non-financial sources. In the book, South African wildlife activist Boyd Varty shares how the ancient skills used to track lions can also be applied to our own lives to find more meaning and to better understand our true selves.

"In the book, there is a great quote: 'I don't know where we are going, but I know exactly how to get there might be the motto of a great tracker,'" said Ferguson. "My take on this as a portfolio manager is — the future is uncertain and never clear until it is in the present — so like a lion tracker we do not know where we are going. However, our people and time-tested process and philosophy is our anchor to the windward and epitomizes our conviction in exactly how to get there — just like a lion tracker."

6. "Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance" by Janet Gleeson

Recommended by: James Abate, founder and chief investment officer at Centre Asset Management

Janet Gleeson's book "Millionaire" thrusts readers into an enthralling journey to understand John Law, the man behind finance as we know it today. While Law charmed Louis XV and his court with his ideas to issue paper money for credit backed by land values, making him rich beyond his wildest dreams, Law later saw his entire empire come crashing down as unchecked speculation and widespread panic swept European financial markets.

"John Law was the original Sam Bankman-Fried," said portfolio manager James Abate. "This is a must-read for understanding human psychology in any time period and speculating in cryptocurrencies or the dot-com bubble … Also great to understand how pandemics have been around since the start of time and their impact on finance."

7. "More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places" by Michael J. Mauboussin

Recommended by: Joshua Wein, portfolio manager at Hennessy Funds

Michael J. Mauboussin's widely-acclaimed "More Than You Know" chronicles traditional investing wisdom for professionals through a wide array of unorthodox sources, like analyzing poker-playing strategies or comparing fish mating patterns to bull markets. "It spoke to how difficult it is to beat the market," portfolio manager Joshua Wein told Insider.

8. "The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations" by Daniel Yergin

Recommended by: Dan McGoey, portfolio manager at Lazard Asset Management

In "The New Map," global energy expert Daniel Yergin lifts the veil from one of the most topically turbulent conflicts today: the clash of powers and politics leading up to the ongoing worldwide energy shortage. Yergin also explores how access to energy amid extreme scarcity can shape the new world order — as well as how the transition to clean energy might dictate a new ranking going forward, with resulting economic and political implications.

9. "On Grand Strategy" by John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis' "On Grand Strategy" is hailed as a master class in leadership and strategic thinking, drawing from a plethora of historic examples like Sun Tzu, Augustus, Elizabeth I, and the Founding Fathers of America, just to name a few — and diving into the pivotal decisions these political leaders had to make under great uncertainty.

"It is a great non-investment book for investors," Souccar said. "The book argues that effective leaders combine a strategic understanding of the situation with a flexible mindset to adapt to new information."

10. "The Platform Delusion: Who Wins and Who Loses in the Age of Tech Titans" by Jonathan Knee

Technological firms may have taken financial markets by storm in the last two decades, but Jonathan Knee's "The Platform Delusion" argues that not all tech companies are created equal.

In the book, Knee successfully demystifies the success of tech titans, separating those that have real competitive advantages, such as Google, from those who don't, such as Netflix, Souccar explained to Insider. It's a great read for any investors or entrepreneurs looking for a long-term roadmap for success and profitability in the tech industry.

11. "Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World" by Tim Marshall

Recommended by: Dan McGoey

In "Prisoners of Geography," journalist Tim Marshall takes a look at the most crucial element that predetermines a nation's strengths and vulnerabilities, and its accompanying political decisions and conflicts — its geography. Marshall's book encompasses a global view, taking readers through conflicts in the Americas, Europe, the South China Sea, and more.

"My aim was to read a book that foresaw the conflict in the Ukraine correctly to better understand what it might teach us about potential outcomes," McGoey told Insider. "Among many key points, the book makes it very clear that maritime access and naval power is as important today to both national security and commerce as it was centuries ago. Readers will leave with a much deeper understanding of how geography often determines politics. And while politics may change, geography does not."

12. "Quit: The Power of Knowing when to Walk Away" by Annie Duke

Recommended by: John Bailer, portfolio manager at BNY Mellon

In "Quit," former professional poker player Annie Duke explores how the inherent human fault of not being able to walk away holds us back from better opportunities. By using anecdotes drawn from famous figures, Duke dispels common paradoxes and proves why quitting is integral to finding success, especially for investors.

"It is so important for an investor to think in probabilities and understand that making mistakes, emotion and losing are all part of investing. The good investors can learn from their mistakes and try to understand luck versus skill. It is the quality of the decision that matters; don't just focus on the outcome," said portfolio manager John Bailer.

13. "The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918" by A. J. P. Taylor

Recommended by: James Abate

A. J. P. Taylor's "The Struggle for Mastery in Europe" chronicles the political and diplomatic developments that shaped European history from 1848 to 1918. "A lot of details that sometimes confuse but great understanding of alliance diplomacy that led to WWI and insight to Putin as he's a man who acts like it's the 19th century and he's Metternich or Bismarck," Abate said. "Another lesson is the trip-wire effects of alliances sometimes."

14. "Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts" by Annie Duke

Recommended by: John Bailer

Another title from former pro poker player Annie Duke, "Thinking in Bets" teaches readers how they can still optimize their decision making skills even when faced with great uncertainty during times of high stakes and stress. Duke successfully shows why employing a degree of confidence is key to avoiding making knee-jerk and emotionally-charged decisions, which can ultimately be destructive over the long term.

15. "Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy" by Jeffrey E. Garten

Recommended by: Brian Levitt, global market strategist at Invesco

Famed economist Jeffrey E. Garten's "Three Days at Camp David" provides a gripping behind-the-scenes look at one of the most pivotal and dramatic turning points in global macroeconomics: the depegging of the US dollar to gold. Garten argues that this action permanently introduced instability and speculation into financial systems, but simultaneously turbocharged the cross-border trade and capital flow that is responsible for our world today. The book also brings to light the arguments made that ending the gold standard could dramatically increase future inflation — an extremely topical point today — and explains to readers the thinking of Fed chairs of the past, which may shed some light on how the central bank will handle its current inflationary challenges.

16. "Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic — and Prevented Economic Disaster" by Nick Timiraos

Recommended by: Ganesh Rao, head of financial technology & services at Thomas H. Lee Partners

In "Trillion Dollar Triage," The Wall Street Journal's chief economics correspondent Nick Timiraos gives readers an inside look at the Federal Reserve's unprecedented response to the COVID-19 pandemic — and the repercussions of the drastic measures Chair Jerome Powell took to keep the economy afloat during this time.

"Given how important the Fed is today in the economy and markets, I found this a really informative read of the history of the Fed, its inner workings, and how they are now responding to inflation, one of the greatest economic challenges of 2022," said Ganesh Rao, head of financial technology & services at Thomas H. Lee Partners.

17. "The Unlucky Investor's Guide to Options Trading" by Julia Spina

Recommended by: JJ Kinahan, CEO of IG North America

In "The Unlucky Investor's Guide to Options Trading," Julia Spina removes the blindfold and demystifies one of the most arcane areas of modern finance. One of the book's highlights is its ability to take an often overcomplicated topic — the math behind options — and break it down into a digestible format for readers, said JJ Kinahan, the CEO of IG North America.

"It gives a very understandable and actionable view of options, relying on statistics and historical data to tell the story," Kinahan shared with Insider. "Most importantly, it starts from a position of risk and how to understand and manage it."

18. "What Works on Wall Street: A Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time" by James O'Shaughnessy

Recommended by: Ryan Kelley, portfolio manager at Hennessy Funds

Legendary investor James O'Shaughnessy's "What Works on Wall Street" is one of the most quintessential reads for any investors seeking long-term success.

"He takes you through reasons why you want to invest for the long-term and why you want to stick to this idea of quantitative fundamentals — how if you look over a long period and focus on just a few fundamentals and valuations of companies, you can see what has worked over time. You can also then tweak those models and change them — it's all about backtesting," said portfolio manager Ryan Kelley.

Kelley added that all "Cornerstone" Hennessy Funds — including the Hennessy Cornerstone Value Fund ( HFCVX ), which beat 97% of its peers in 2022 —  are based on methodologies drawn from this book.

19. "When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management" by Roger Lowenstein

Recommended by: Joshua Wein

Esteemed journalist Roger Lowenstein's "When Genius Failed" is an engrossing story behind the rise and catastrophic fall of Long-Term Capital Management, a highly-leveraged hedge fund and the darling of Wall Street at its peak.

"It's an older book about long-term capital, but I think it speaks volumes about this idea that there are these really, really smart people that have the secret," Wein explained. "I think it's kind of this fallacy that we all love to believe is possibly true — that if you gather enough PhD's in a room, then you're all set."

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Wall Street Journal's Best Books of 2023

The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions (Hardcover)

A Dictator Calls (Paperback)

The Lost Wife: A novel (Hardcover)

An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford (Paperback)

Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict (Hardcover)

Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution (Hardcover)

The Sun Walks Down: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (Hardcover)

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Hardcover)

click here to read it now

Read this week's magazine

The 'Wall Street Journal' Drops Its Bestseller Lists

The Wall Street Journal has stopped running its weekly bestseller lists. The final lists were carried in the past weekend's editions. The paper ran a total of six fiction and nonfiction lists, as well as a hardcover business list. All were powered by Circana BookScan.

The fiction and nonfiction categories were both divided into hardcover, e-book, and combined lists. In something of a unique feature, the lists combined adult and children’s titles on one list. Thus, last week’s top-selling hardcover fiction book was Jeff Kinney’s No Brainer, while The Woman in Me by Britney Spears was number one in all three nonfiction categories, including the e-book/print combined list.

Paul Gigot, editorial page editor at the WSJ, said that the company’s contract with Circana expired, “and we are not renewing it.” He added that all other aspects of the paper’s book coverage will “continue as usual.”

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The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2023

“yes, it’s her world and after reading her book i just wish i could move off-planet.”.

“With the kids jingle belling And everyone telling you be of good cheer…” *

Welcome, fellow haters, to another bilious edition of the Most Scathing Book Reviews of the Year.

As longtime readers of this annual feature will know, each year in the run up to the holidays, we (the normally benevolent stewards of BookMarks.reviews ) make a sacrificial offering to the literary criticism gods in the hope of a bountiful review harvest for the coming year.

Among the books being flung into the fiery pit this time around: Walter Isaacson’s “dull, insight-free doorstop” biography of Elon Musk; Paris Hilton’s “vapid and vaporous” memoir; Tom Hanks’ “bland busman’s holiday dressed up as literary fiction”; and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “hollow PR exercise.”

So here they are, in all their gory, gut-punchin’ glory: the most scathing book reviews of 2023.

“Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer … There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter  …

To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best …

There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your savior turns out to be the world’s loudest crank? So who or what is responsible for Elon Musk? ‘Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal,’ Musk says, and there’s a whiff of desperate masculinity floating through the book, as rank as a Pretoria boys’ locker room. It is not a coincidence that the back jacket features a fully erect penis (some may argue it is actually one of Musk’s rockets, but I remain unconvinced) …

Isaacson’s book constantly tries to build dramatic tension between the species-saving visionary and the beaten bullied boy. But we know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win.”

–Gary Shteyngart on Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk ( The Guardian )

“The overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard—someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly …

All the culture war Mad Libs can’t distract from the dull coldness at this book’s core. A former military prosecutor, DeSantis is undeniably diligent and disciplined … Even the title, with its awkward feint at boldness while clinging to the safety of cliché, suggests the anxiety of an ambitious politician who really, really wants to run for president in 2024 and knows he needs the grievance vote … For the most part, The Courage to Be Free  is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor . While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT …

At around 250 pages, this isn’t a particularly long book, but it’s padded with such banalities … Take out the gauzy abstraction, the heartwarming clichés, and much of what DeSantis is describing in The Courage to Be Free is chilling—unfree and scary.”

–Jennifer Szalai on Ron DeSantis’ The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival ( The New York Times )

“…a book that must rank as one of the most bizarre I’ve ever read. Yes, it is—at moments—very sad. There’s ongoing shame in it for tabloid journalism. But for a title written explicitly in the cause of securing sympathy and understanding for its so-called author, boy, does it misfire. It’s not only that Harry is so petulant: a man who thinks nothing, even now, of complaining about the bedroom he was allotted for his summer hols in Granny’s castle. With every page, his California makeover grows less convincing …

What kind of person insists on an air-clearing meeting with their father on the day of his father’s funeral? A myopic, self-obsessed, non-empathic kind of person, I would say. Exactly the same kind of person, in fact, who would talk about reconciliation in the same breath as they publicly slag off their family … Such things are made all the more jarring by the yawning gap between the way Harry speaks and the way his ghost, JR Moehringer, writes…I suppose he wishes he were Ben Lerner, or some other hip young literary American gunslinger, rather than having to channel a raging Sloane who must look up the word compere in a dictionary when his brother asks him to be one at his wedding and whose epigraph from Faulkner—’The past is never dead. It’s not even past’—he found on brainyquote.com. Sometimes, Moehringer writes. Like this. In short sentences. Bang. Bang-bang. At other times, it’s as if he’s been at Harry’s weed or something …

Here we are. Penguin Random House has helped him out and we can only hope he’s happy with his end of the deal, a pact more Faustian by far than anything his father or brother have ever signed. ”

–Rachel Cooke on Prince Harry’s Spare ( The Guardian )

“…amounts to a book-length shrug … At least you can say there’s no false advertising. Roxane Gay’s new collection of essays is titled Opinions , after all, not Thoughts or Ideas. She gives us exactly what she promises: a series of opinions on various subjects, arranged haphazardly, adding up to nothing substantial at all …

It isn’t Gay’s fault that feminism became so devoid of meaning that our hard-won slogans were easily stripped from their context and used by bad actors to fight against abortion rights, to protest vaccine and mask mandates during the pandemic, and to harass trans women. But Gay, in her anti-intellectual stance, became a kind of mother figure for those who would prefer to avoid thinking their way through cognitive dissonance, smoothing back their hair to coo, ‘you’re already perfect, just the way you are’ …

It’s not an argument for acknowledging complexity, it’s an argument for not thinking. It’s an argument for focusing, first and foremost, on our own comfort … Such tepid writing makes no intellectual, ideological or psychological demand of its reader. Working against ideology might look like a principled, sophisticated stance, one that values nuance and uncertainty, but instead it reveals a lack of rigour. If anything, you could say that ‘comfort’ is her primary ideology, as she uses the word and its variations dozens of times throughout …

Readers see her waffling and confuse it for courage … ‘Extend your empathy’ is her instruction—as vague and thoughtless as an advertisement for a new moisturiser. This book is proof that the anti-fascist philosopher Simone Weil was right, when she wrote: ‘There is nothing more comfortable than not thinking.’”

–Jessa Crispin on Roxane Gay’s Opinions ( The Telegraph )

“ Killing Moon is so cruelly, brutally misogynistic and brimming with every savage cliche of crime fiction that it’s barely readable … Nearly ten pages into Killing Moon , I wondered whether Nesbo had always depicted women in such a cruel, hateful way. Did I overlook it for two whole decades? … Perhaps some readers simply don’t mind Nesbo’s description of young women as ‘parasitic bimbos on the hunt for a suitable host’ because, as he asserts, it’s traditional …

Maybe someone needs to remind Nesbo that storytelling in fiction allows us to explore alternate worlds. It lets us stand in the shoes of characters who are both like us and entirely different so we can expand our thinking and take on new perspectives. Storytelling that relies on tired cliches that frame women as hapless gold-digging victims who are lucky to have an ancient, alcoholic ex-cop on their case is a literary tradition we can do without.”

–Cat Woods on Jo Nesbø’s Killing Moon ( Observer )

“Melodramas of oppression and resistance do not brook much nuance, and, in any event, it can be difficult to insist on ethical complexity when faced with a story that resonated with many readers … Mom Rage is Dubin’s book-length effort to grant mothers the absolution that many of them seek … Dubin’s claims and prescriptions are, by now, staples of pop-feminist nonfiction …

The newer books—call them ‘feminish’—engage only sparingly with the original sources. Reading paraphrases of paraphrases of paraphrases, one starts to feel as if there is something a little hollow and shiftless about the ease with which phrases such as ‘white supremacist, homophobic, classist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, capitalist patriarchy’ are trotted out. We get the right words, strung together like marquee lights, but not the structural analysis that puts them in relation to one another …

Dubin does not appear to have interviewed any mothers who do not claim to suffer from mom rage. Nor has she interviewed father … No doubt the patriarchy and capitalism have power, but how precisely that power results in the rage of mothers toward their children, as opposed to their husbands or their bosses, remains unclear … The imprecision of Dubin’s language strands her argument on unstable ground …

The book fails to universalize a particular predicament, and, in strenuously attempting to do so, turns into an exercise in ill-advised candor … How clearly can a writer see anyone or anything—her children or the social and political contours of motherhood—when she perceives everything through the haze of moral cliché? ”

–Merve Emre on Minna Dubin’s Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood ( The New Yorker )

“Now, in her early 40s, she has published a memoir, which for ephemeral, unreflective celebrities like her is usually a way of fending off imminent obsolescence. The book—ventriloquized by Joni Rodgers, who describes herself as a ‘story whisperer’—is as vapid and vaporous as the fragrances Hilton sells; all the same, archaeologists may one day consult it in the hope of understanding how and why our species underwent a final mutation into something glossily post-human. The antics of this entitled flibbertigibbet expose the absurdity of a culture in which the self only exists if it is validated by a selfie, membership of society depends on the mirage of social media and the reality in which we were all once anchored has been replaced by a flimsy virtual replica …

This air-headed mysticism merges with the digital revolution, which allowed Hilton to disseminate her image around the globe and to seep into our defenseless heads …  Yes, it’s her world and after reading her book I just wish I could move off-planet. ”

–Peter Conrad on Paris Hilton’s Paris: The Memoir ( The Guardian )

“…an ascendant group of conservative thinkers persists in defining liberalism as everything and nothing…This motley crew might have served as an advertisement for liberalism’s commitment to religious toleration, were its denizens not united by their shared distaste for globalism, the sexual revolution and allegedly latte-lapping elites … Deneen’s disregard for details, among them the awkward fact that no one actually defends the position he attributes to practically everyone, is unfortunately characteristic . The post-liberals are dramatic, even hysterical, stylists, prone to sweeping pronouncements about the entirety of culture since the dawn of time …

The uninitiated might wonder whether Deneen should have consulted a single ambassador of ‘the many’ before making so many confident assertions about ‘what most ordinary people instinctively seek’ … Deneen makes it easy to turn away from his politics of personality and his terminological indignities.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Patrick J. Deneen’s Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future ( The Washington Post )

“No…fever pitch is reached in Alderman’s new novel, whose outlook is decidedly more reformist than revolutionary. Instead of a bottom-up social movement led by young women, change in The Future comes from the top down … What follows is a dubious effort to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Alderman has an undeniable talent for concocting a twisty, rollicking narrative, replete with assassination attempts, desert island bunkers and machine-learning prophets. Yet for all its conspiratorial thrills, The Future mostly reads like a manifesto for technocracy wrapped up in a genre-fiction bow …

The book suffers not just from its dogmatism but also from its homogeneity … The book’s most impressive quality is its vivid, tactile imagination of our ultra-computerized future … Though it purports to affirm the human capacity for empathy and curiosity, The Future is built like a machine: calculating, doctrinaire and hollow on the inside. ”

–Ian Wang on Naomi Alderman’s The Future ( The New York Times Book Review )

“ All this should be fun. But alas, The Romantic is a tired, spiritless piece of work , written as if Mr. Boyd was slogging dutifully through the formula he created and has previously used to better effect … Who is Mr. Boyd’s target reader, one wonders? Anyone with a genuine interest in the Byron and Shelley circle, or African exploration, or literary London, will find nothing of consequence in these pages. And anyone looking for an engrossing love story will not find one in the conventional romance of Ross and his Raphaella. The novel might serve as a novice’s introduction to the period, a sort of 19th Century 101. But for an author of Mr. Boyd’s reputation, that’s a low bar to set.”

–Brooke Allen on William Boyd’s The Romantic ( The Wall Street Journal )

“As usual the ‘action’ proceeds by peristalsis, with descriptions of roads, shops, real estate, traffic jams, motels, tourist attractions and free publications constantly interrupted by long, unwieldy flashbacks to all the stuff that’s happened since the last Frank Bascombe novel. It’s immersive stuff: reading these books is the closest you’ll come to being stuck in an actual traffic jam without leaving the comfort of your armchair …

I wonder whether a) people arrive at these books predisposed to favour fiction that showcases the mundane and b) the swathes of mediocre prose slip under the radar because it’s basically quite easy to read … If you like the boring bits of Knausgaard and Ford, I can’t argue with that. But I’m still going to try to persuade you not to read Be Mine , for several other reasons. First, there’s nothing novel about this novel … Why this boorish, boring also-ran is taking up fresh shelf space in 2023 is a mystery .”

–Claire Lowdon on Richard Ford’s Be Mine ( Times Literary Supplement )

“The most intriguing thing about Central Park West —in a way, the real mystery here—is the strange sense that there is something missing. For all his power and access, all those decades of crimes and secrets, Comey has produced any other middle-aged lawyer’s clunky but passable fling at that courtroom novel he always threatened to write. It raises an almost depressing question: Does Comey—do any of these politicos turned authors—have anything to reveal at all? …

To describe the prose as workmanlike would be too kind. It is often lurching and awkward, and the dialogue frequently reads like someone ran the original English through a machine translator into a foreign language and back again … Location descriptions are painful, like notes that a more fluent writer would plug in fully intending to come back to on a second draft … But there is still something to like here. Within reason. For all its clichés, it is a work of genuine imagination. It is plotted with reasonable care …

How deflating, then, to discover that the most these semiretired potentates of the great secret machinery of government can imagine amounts to a rip-off of more professionally written TV shows and mid-tier Hollywood action properties.”

–Jacob Bacharach on James Comey’s Central Park West ( The New Republic )

“It would be nice at this point to confirm Hanks’s book as a satire. That way we could applaud the means by which it deftly—even affectionately—pricks the pompous self-regard of Hollywood’s inner circle, complete with a star who unwinds by taking her Cirrus jet for a spin and a gonzo method actor who insists on sleeping in a tent. We might then go on to laugh at the idiotic footnotes that provide a needless justification for the use of slang and blithely mis-explain Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin. Alarmingly, though, this tale is deadly serious. Johnson is great and Knightshade is amazing and therefore everything about them is a source of endless fascination. The production, says Hanks, runs for 53 days. Somehow his book makes it feel even longer …

A bland busman’s holiday dressed up as literary fiction, a bungled behind-the-scenes tour that can’t see the wood for the trees. It’s crying out for an editor. The plot is borderline incontinent … aking a movie is tough; writing a novel is hard, too. So accentuate the positives, draw a line and move on. On a pure sentence level Hanks’s book is at times pretty good. Overall I confess it was very much not for me.”

–Xan Brooks on Tom Hanks’ The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece ( The Guardian )

“Ms. Streisand is a woman of many talents. Curating memories of the way she was—well, that isn’t one of them … This plaintive observation would have packed a greater punch had it not been buried in an avalanche of minutiae about Ms. Streisand’s grade-school crushes, her pastries of choice at the local bakery, her ideal bagel toppings, her preferred beverage at the drugstore and her favorite treats at the movie theater … There may be gold there, but readers will have to pan diligently …

For 40 years, Ms. Streisand says, editors, including Jacqueline Onassis, asked her to write an autobiography. She steadfastly declined because of her desire to live in the present rather than dwell in the past. It should come as a surprise to exactly no one that, having finally acceded, Ms. Streisand charged full-bore into yesteryear. In so doing, she failed to remember her reaction to the overemoting Mr. Patinkin in the early days of the Yentl shoot: Sometimes less is more … Doesn’t have an index, so there are no shortcuts for impatient readers … Even her most devoted followers will be crying uncle or, more to the point, Yentl. ”

–Joanne Kaufman on Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra ( The Wall Street Journal )

“What of the book? Permit me to save you the trouble of finding out for yourself: Be Useful is a raw deal, a hollow PR exercise filled with precepts and quips but devoid of self-awareness or humility . You might be swayed by Arnie’s touching faith in bipartisanship and the need to tackle the climate crisis or moved by his tales of heroic procurement of personal protective equipment during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. But as a pitch for Marcus Aurelius status…it’s thoroughly expendable—an overpromoted TED Talk, just another cross-promotional weapon in the Schwarzenegger multimedia arsenal.”

–Charles Arrowsmith on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life ( The Los Angeles Times )

Thirsty for more takedowns?  Reacquaint yourself with the most scathing book reviews of 2017  ,  2018 ,  2019 ,  2020 , 2021 , and 2022 .

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Even Michael Lewis Can’t Make a Hero Out of Sam Bankman-Fried

“Going Infinite,” Lewis’s new book about the disgraced crypto billionaire, defies the author’s winning formula of upbeat narratives and unsung genius.

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By Jennifer Szalai

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GOING INFINITE: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon , by Michael Lewis

Reading “Going Infinite,” Michael Lewis’s strange new book about the disgraced crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, you soon get the sense that Lewis felt unusually flummoxed by his material. Among the reliable pleasures offered by a Michael Lewis book are his formidable storytelling skills, his comic timing, his winsome confidence. He makes sure to give you an unsung hero to root for: the dedicated public servant , the renegade baseball general manager , the contrarian investor who doesn’t get snookered by the hype. Even Lewis’s first book, “Liar’s Poker,” which recounts all kinds of bad behavior on Wall Street, is structured around a young man named Michael Lewis who leaves the “absurd money game” of finance for the bright lights of journalism and best-sellerdom.

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Bankman-Fried was supposed to be another hero in this vein — or at least that’s what Lewis suggests in the opening pages of “Going Infinite,” recalling how a friend who was about to close a deal with Bankman-Fried had asked Lewis to look into him. After his first meeting with Bankman-Fried at the end of 2021, Lewis says, he “was totally sold.” He called up his friend: “Go for it! Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do! What could possibly go wrong?”

The profusion of exclamation points is a tipoff that Lewis is at least somewhat aware how dumb such optimism looks in retrospect — especially now that jury selection for Bankman-Fried’s trial on fraud charges is scheduled to begin on Tuesday, which is also the book’s publication date. But “Going Infinite” still contains zombie traces of the old unsung hero project, one that should have taken a definitive drubbing last November, when Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire imploded. Lewis, who traveled back and forth from the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried was based, had, in the months leading up to the disaster, a front-row seat — from which he could apparently see nothing. “As late as the final days of October 2022,” he writes, “you could have ransacked the jungle huts until you were blue in the face and have had not the faintest sense that anything was amiss.”

“Not the faintest sense”? That April, Bankman-Fried had given an infamous interview to Bloomberg’s Matt Levine in which he all but admitted that the cryptocurrency industry — the linchpin of the Bankman-Fried edifice — was like a Ponzi scheme . (Zeke Faux’s recent book “Number Go Up” offers a shrewdly skeptical view of crypto where “Going Infinite” is stubbornly credulous.) Not to mention that a crypto crash had already begun earlier that year.

But Bankman-Fried had long been positioning himself as a different kind of crypto guy. He was a vegan, because he cared about the earth; he slept on a beanbag chair by his desk, because he didn’t care about his personal comfort. In 2017, he helped found a crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, and two years later built a crypto futures exchange, FTX, because he was an effective altruist whose goal was to make enormous amounts of money to donate to worthy causes.

“Infinity dollars” was in fact how Bankman-Fried put it to Lewis at their first meeting, explaining how much money he needed to address existential risks, like an apocalypse started by artificial intelligence. Lewis found the discrepancy between Bankman-Fried’s grand ambitions and disheveled self-presentation intriguing. He was far from alone. The incessant video game-playing, the furtive lack of eye contact, the unkempt hair — it all became part of the billionaire’s brand , which was burnished by his supposed do-gooder intentions. While Lewis was shadowing Bankman-Fried, Bankman-Fried also seemed to be on an endless publicity tour, eager to sing to any journalist who was willing to listen.

And Lewis listened. He offers the quirky portrait that is standard fare in his books. We learn that Bankman-Fried is someone who is unmoved by art and disdainful of Shakespeare (“unrealistic characters, illogical plots and obvious endings”). He cares a lot about “humanity” but little about individual humans (“I guess I should care the same amount about everyone”). He has little patience with the concept of responsibility (“fault is just a construct of human society”). He allowed Lewis to read his “private writings,” in which he complained about being consistently misunderstood. “No one is curious,” a morose Bankman-Fried wrote while working at the quantitative trading firm Jane Street after college. “No one cares, not really, about the self I see.”

Given the financial wreckage in FTX’s wake, this kind of self-pity might sound like the world’s tiniest violin. Bankman-Fried is given ample space in this book to air his pet theories about what led to the collapse, while insisting that his intentions were always pure. Occasionally, Lewis will hand the mic to a devastated subordinate who finds Bankman-Fried’s excuses hard to swallow. “He made me try to believe it was an accounting error,” says one woman. He “let me go out and lie” for him, says another former employee. Lewis, for his part, says he kept trying to get to the bottom of what happened — though his endless interviews with Bankman-Fried seemed to yield diminishing returns: “I’d poke and prod and always come away with the sense that I’d learned less than I need to know.”

But this isn’t a book of investigative journalism; this is Lewis’s account of being a fly on the wall — a perspective that’s all well and good when your subject isn’t a billionaire savant who is charged with defrauding people who trusted him. Lewis seems so attached to the protagonist of his narrative that he takes an awful lot in stride. He tells us that Bankman-Fried is so worried about the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump that he was planning to give the Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell “$15-$30 million” to “defeat the Trumpier candidates in the U.S. Senate races.” Thirty million? To Mitch McConnell? To save democracy? (Bankman-Fried also said that he was told that Trump might be willing to sit out the next election for $5 billion.)

Lewis ends his story by describing how Bankman-Fried’s parents were so fearful for their security that they purchased a German shepherd named Sandor, who had been trained to kill on command when given the correct instructions in German. The parents had learned the commands, but Sam had not. “So when Sam was in a room with the dog, it always felt as if some accident was waiting to happen,” Lewis writes. “It would have been very Sam Bankman-Fried to have been eaten by his own guard dog.”

Is this supposed to be a metaphor? Or maybe an attempt at a joke? Is Lewis trying to suggest that the guard dog is somehow like those former employees who are expected to testify against Bankman-Fried?

Lewis is an undeniably talented writer, but the subject of Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t play to his strengths. He knows how to write a happy story, not a tragic one. I keep thinking about what Christina Rolle, the chief financial regulator in the Bahamas, said about Bankman-Fried soon after everything came crashing down. “I don’t think he knows why people don’t trust him,” she told Lewis. “It’s not hard to see you are being played by him, like a board game.”

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro .

GOING INFINITE : The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon | By Michael Lewis | Norton | 254 pp. | $30

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai

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