I am a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and I am interested in global capitalism, financial elites, and all aspects of how people broker capital deals. I am a scholar of anti-heroes who studies all of the ways that people play in the gray. My first book, Dealing in Desire, is an ethnography where I embedded myself in several different hostess bars to study the relationship between sex work and financial deal-making. I grew up in California but have lived most of my adult life in Ho Chi Minh City, Houston, Boston, and Chicago.
I wrote...
Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets
I am a sociologist who is interested in dealing with emerging and frontier markets. I use ethnographic and interview methods to examine highly risky, corrupt markets with no clear rule of law. Spiderweb Capitalism takes you inside this shadow economy, uncovering the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders and around the globe. I traveled over 350,000 miles and interviewed hundreds of people to trace the ownership of global capital by Chinese, Middle Eastern, Russian, and Western elites held in offshore accounts like the British Virgin Islands Seychelles, Singapore, and Hong Kong before those funds were invested “onshore” in Vietnam and Myanmar.
I loved this book because it is such an incredible example of brave journalism that exposes one of the biggest global financial scandals in history. The book outlines an intricate web of corruption involving a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund. It draws connections between Malaysia, Singapore, the Middle East, and the United States of America.
I love how they tell the story of an awkward schoolboy who finds a way to make it in with some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities and some of the most reputable financial institutions, like Goldman Sachs. The book also shows who the “fall people” are, who bear all of the criminal risks while the mastermind, Jho Low, has not been caught.
In 2009, with the dust yet to settle on the financial crisis, a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude was being set into motion. It began in Malaysia and would spread around the world, touching some of the world's leading financial firms, A-list Hollywood celebrities, supermodels, Las Vegas casinos and nightclubs, and even the art world. Now known as the 1MDB affair, the scandal would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system.
Federal agents who helped unravel Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme say the 1MDB affair will become the textbook case of financial fraud in the…
I found this book to be a raw act of bravery. Desmond Shum describes his and his ex-wife Whitney Duan’s economic ascendancy in China as they climbed to become part of a billionaire class. Shum describes all of the ways they had to play in the gray in order to successfully execute massive real estate and airport projects. On a personal level, he takes you inside his life as an elite, purchasing expensive homes, vehicles, and art. But just as quickly as they rose, his wife vanished as part of the party’s use of extralegal kidnappings to facilitate investigations into corruption.
This book is one man’s act of bravery in risking everything to tell his story while also implicating himself in corrupt activity. He shows us that charges of corruption must be understood through a political lens with the objective of consolidating power and preserving the legitimacy of the Communist Party.
This is one of my favorite new books that provides an on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship. I learned a tremendous amount about the “market” for passports.
Surak provides a window into the states and brokers who sell them and the billionaire/multimillionaire elites who can afford to buy them. With an incredible six years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, she shows the scale of a full-blown industry where buyers, brokers, and sellers all profit from the citizenship trade.
"[A] fascinating study of how people and their capital seek to move around a world that is at once hugely interconnected and driven by inequities...definitive, detailed, and unusually nuanced." Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Foreign Affairs
The first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship, examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them, and the normalization of a once shadowy practice.
Our lives are in countless ways defined by our citizenship. The country we belong to affects our rights, our travel possibilities, and ultimately our chances in life. Obtaining a new citizenship is rarely…
I love this book because it is one of those rare books written by a woman who trained to become a wealth manager in order to tell a story about how the ultra-rich keep getting richer despite taxes on income, capital gains, property, and inheritance. In her groundbreaking investigations, she follows the money of the ultra-wealthy through some of the most popular offshore tax havens. She also interviews wealth managers to shed light on how they help their clients dodge taxes and creditors and hide money from their families. I am in awe of the author's achievement.
"A timely account of how the 1% holds on to their wealth...Ought to keep wealth managers awake at night." -Wall Street Journal
"Harrington advises governments seeking to address inequality to focus not only on the rich but also on the professionals who help them game the system." -Richard Cooper, Foreign Affairs
"An insight unlike any other into how wealth management works." -Felix Martin, New Statesman
"One of those rare books where you just have to stand back in awe and wonder at the author's achievement...Harrington offers profound insights into the world of the professional people who dedicate their lives to…
I loved this book because it takes you inside the exclusive world of the ultra-wealthy within the United States and shows how the richest are exploiting the natural environment in Teton County, Wyoming, to solve personal existential crises.
The author managed to get incredible access to prominent tech CEOs, Wall Street financiers, and other ultra-high-net-worth individuals who have moved to a place where they can profit from their environmental philanthropy while also contributing to ever-widening economic inequality by privatizing public goods. I thought this book provided a fair yet fascinating insight into the contradictions of philanthropy, which allow the rich to donate in ways that absolve themselves from the guilt of the inequality that they contribute to.
A revealing look at the intersection of wealth, philanthropy, and conservation
Billionaire Wilderness takes you inside the exclusive world of the ultra-wealthy, showing how today's richest people are using the natural environment to solve the existential dilemmas they face. Justin Farrell spent five years in Teton County, Wyoming, the richest county in the United States, and a community where income inequality is the worst in the nation. He conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews, gaining unprecedented access to tech CEOs, Wall Street financiers, and other prominent figures in business and politics. He also talked with the rural poor who live among…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of citations and interviews with more than 250 key protagonists, experts, and witnesses.
So far, the book is the main -- and only -- antidote to a slew of early partisan “Benghazi” polemics, and the first to put the attack in its longer term historical, political, and social context. If you want to understand some of the events that have shaped present-day America, from political polarization and the election of Donald Trump, to January 6, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russian expansionism, and the current Israel-Hamas war, I argue, you need to understand some of the twists and turns of America's most infamous "non-scandal, scandal.”
I was in Benghazi well before, during, and after the attack as a US diplomat and co-director of a medical NGO. I have written three books, and have been a contributor to The NYT, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, Salon, The Financial Times, Newsweek, and others.
On September 11, 2012, Al Qaeda proxies attacked and set fire to the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing a US Ambassador and three other Americans. The attack launched one of the longest and most consequential 'scandals' in US history, only to disappear from public view once its political value was spent.
Written in a highly engaging narrative style by one of a few Western experts on Libya, and decidely non-partisan, Benghazi!: A New History is the first to provide the full context for an event that divided, incited, and baffled most of America for more than three years, while silently reshaping…
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