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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
medium-paced
A very good read, but so long that the movie would have been an appealing option if I hadn't already seen it. (It's good too.)
A very good read, but so long that the movie would have been an appealing option if I hadn't already seen it. (It's good too.)
A great story--and the way Eichenwald tells it, layer upon layer, is masterful
This one's tricky. It's a fascinating story with a complex man named Mark Whitacre at the center of the storm. (I've already added the movie adaptation to my Netflix queue. I'm curious to see what Matt Damon does with this guy.) It covers a broad range of topics including fraud, corporate espionage, relationships between the FBI and cooperating witnesses, relationships between the FBI and other federal agencies, loyalty, political corruption, mental illness...and the list goes on. The fact that it covers so much ground is both its strength and its weakness. The book was an ambitious behemoth. Sometimes it felt overwhelming, and it didn't help that Eichenwald was so freakin' thorough.
To some degree, he needed to provide detail to keep the book interesting (and accurate). He takes it a little far though. At one point, the author describes exactly what food the executives were eating at one of their meetings. He also really liked describing what people were wearing, including the color of their tie. There's a fine line between providing enough detail to set the scene and boring the crap out of a reader who really just wants to know how the story ends. I was having a hard enough time keeping the enormous cast of characters straight without these sorts of extraneous details. (Why do authors think this problem is solved by having a list of characters at the beginning of the book? Do they really think it will be enjoyable for the reader to keep flipping back and forth to check that?) Eichenwald is constantly switching perspectives and I struggled to keep up. I read this book relatively quickly, but that was mostly because I was worried that if I put it down for a few days I'd be hopelessly lost when I picked it back up.
5 stars as a detailed historical record of an important sequence of events. 4 stars as journalism melded with engaging storytelling. But only 3 stars as an enjoyable read for me.
To some degree, he needed to provide detail to keep the book interesting (and accurate). He takes it a little far though. At one point, the author describes exactly what food the executives were eating at one of their meetings. He also really liked describing what people were wearing, including the color of their tie. There's a fine line between providing enough detail to set the scene and boring the crap out of a reader who really just wants to know how the story ends. I was having a hard enough time keeping the enormous cast of characters straight without these sorts of extraneous details. (Why do authors think this problem is solved by having a list of characters at the beginning of the book? Do they really think it will be enjoyable for the reader to keep flipping back and forth to check that?) Eichenwald is constantly switching perspectives and I struggled to keep up. I read this book relatively quickly, but that was mostly because I was worried that if I put it down for a few days I'd be hopelessly lost when I picked it back up.
5 stars as a detailed historical record of an important sequence of events. 4 stars as journalism melded with engaging storytelling. But only 3 stars as an enjoyable read for me.
This was a very "dry" read for me. I actually had to force myself to finish this book. It was a pretty amazing story, just too many details.
Goes on a little long, out of necessity no doubt, but this is so incredibly compelling.
This book is about price fixing, which, while terrible for consumers & a nefarious thing all around, is also one of those most boring crimes ever. It's interesting to see that a lot of the dumb things that Matt Damon says in the commercial for the movie The Informant (havent' seen that one yet) are actually credited to Mark Whitacre, most notably, "Just call me 014 because I'm twice as smart as 007."