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crowyhead's review
3.0
The story of Poyais, the gorgeous South American country that never existed... The tale is fascinating, but Sinclair sucks a lot of the interest out of it with a pedestrian writing style. He can't seem to distinguish between what is interesting detail and what is just excess. I was left feeling that the book was interesting in spite of, rather than because of, the way it was written.
mirror_matt's review
4.0
I picked this up after listening to a Behind the Bastards episode on Sir Gregor MacGregor whose con I'm interested in updating and fictionalizing. David Sinclair's prose can be quite dry at times, but his healthy balance of admiration and contempt for MacGregor grounds the story. There is a direct line to modern confidence tricksters and frauds, like Fyre Fest as well as the crypto market, NFTs, and perhaps Elon Musk and other tech billionaires.
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