When I was growing up, Go Ask Alice, the "true diary" of an anonymous teen girl, nicknamed Alice, was still an ubiquitous must-read despite being released in 1971, already decades old at that point. It's a salacious, haphazard diary of a young girl who is dosed once with LSD at a high school party, from... Continue Reading →
Financial Crime in Russia and the Heartbreaking Story of the Magnitsky Act
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice, by Bill Browderpublished 2015 by Simon & Schuster - Used or new @ SecondSale.com The American-born, now British financier Bill Browder got in on the nascent world of free-market Eastern Europe at the beginning, when, during his work for the... Continue Reading →
Two on Cons: The Confidence Game and Confident Women
The Confidence Game, by Maria Konnikova (Viking, 2016) Psychologist Konnikova takes a pop psych look at a subject so many of us find magnetically fascinating - con artists and why their manipulations work. She breaks down some of the psychology behind cons and the beliefs and tendencies in the average person that these play to,... Continue Reading →
Conning Culture: Hype in the Social Media Age
Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following The story of the Fyre Festival, which saw Instagram influencers tricked into promoting a music festival on a private Bahamian island with luxury accommodations, gourmet dining and a picturesque setting, only to turn out to be a few rain-soaked tents... Continue Reading →
Susannah Cahalan Investigates the “Pretenders” of a Groundbreaking Psychiatric Study
Book review: The Great Pretender, by Susannah Cahalan (Amazon / Book Depository) The Great Pretender, Susannah Cahalan's first book since Brain on Fire, her 2012 memoir of a rare, difficult-to-diagnose autoimmune disorder, investigates an infamous and groundbreaking 1973 study carried out by psychiatrist David Rosenhan. Rosenhan sent a group of eight healthy "pseudopatients" into mental institutions... Continue Reading →
Survivors’ Stories from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society
Book review: Before and After, by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate (Amazon / Book Depository) Author Lisa Wingate wrote a popular novel in 2017, Before We Were Yours, a fictionalized story about children adopted from the notorious Tennessee Children's Home Society ("TCHS"). Starting in the 1920s through 1950, a woman named Georgia Tann ran this "questionable"... Continue Reading →
Going Underground in the Truffle Market’s Dark Economy
Book review: The Truffle Underground, by Ryan Jacobs (Amazon / Book Depository) The larger industry has managed to manufacture an image of pure beauty and romance for its consumers. "They see the truffle on the table...but before that, they don't know anything. They don't know the underworld." Truffles, one of the priciest delicacies you can... Continue Reading →
The Mystery of a Clairvoyant and a Con
Book review: A Deal with the Devil, by Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken (Amazon / Book Depository) We knew that many people thought of all psychics as frauds. We'd heard plenty of horror stories about people who lost thousands of dollars to storefront psychics or psychic hotlines. But we had never heard of a psychic scam... Continue Reading →
The Fall of a Too-Good-to-Be-True Medical Startup
Book review: Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou Amazon Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men. Women like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had achieved a measure of renown in Silicon Valley, but they hadn’t created their own companies from... Continue Reading →
A Cancer Con Exposes the Sick Side of “Wellness”
Book review: The Woman Who Fooled the World, by Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano Amazon The front cover of the book whispered of a back-to-basics approach to wellness, lifestyle and nutrition. Of course, Gibson had no expertise in any such area. But that didn't matter. Her credentials were listed in the first words of the... Continue Reading →
Weird, Wonderful Observations on Mysteries of Scandal, Fraud, Psychics, and Other Curiosities
Book review: Lost at Sea, by Jon Ronson Amazon So You've Been Publicly Shamed is one of those books that I haven't been able to decide if I should read. But I knew as soon as I heard comedian Karen Kilgariff describe another of British journalist Jon Ronson's books, Lost at Sea, that I had to read... Continue Reading →
Better Off Dead?
Book review: Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud by Elizabeth Greenwood (Amazon / Book Depository) What a fun read this is, considering the weightiness of the subject matter! Elizabeth Greenwood needs an out from her life - saddled with the burden of crushing student debt, frustrated working a job that will never... Continue Reading →