Word: riches
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Rich Like Them: My Door-To-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America's Richest NeighborhoodsRyan D'AgostinoLittle, Brown; 256 pages...
...Wesport, Connecticut - to attempt to discover the secrets of wealth. He utilized a very simple technique; he knocked on doors of expensive looking homes and asked the owners how they got where they are today. As D'Agostino writes, "If I knocked on enough doors in enough preposterously rich enclaves, I might gather enough insight and guidance to help me...understand how to get rich; rich like them. Simple as that." (See pictures of expensive things that money...
...year is upon us. Break out the optimism, the resolutions and the thinly-veiled self-help books. There are some, like Henry Alford's How To Live that hide their chicken-soup soul within the well-structured tale of a fruitful personal journey. Then there are those such as Rich Like Them, whose vigorous attempts to shake off the label ("It's not what you think of as a traditional self-help book...I chose instead to look at the context of these lives, to tell people's stories"), just end up making the author sound slightly embarrassed...
...financial crisis - well, D'Agostino must either be smacking himself in the face with regret or clinching his fists and yelling "Yes!" (given that he advises several times to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities, it's probably the latter). Full of real-estate developers, venture capitalists and tech mavens, Rich Like Them fills the reader first with a sense of schadenfreude. After that passes, a sad-ish feeling of, "I wonder what happened to all those rich folk" settles in. Do they still have those nice houses whose doors D'Agostino knocked on, whose foyers he walked into, whose waterfront...
...Answering the first is easy: there's a lot of trouble to get into. With Thailand bordering the opium-rich Golden Triangle, there will always be men like Botts who are fooled by the country's freewheeling reputation and corrupt police force into thinking that smuggling out heroin in cans of shaving foam is a sensible way to earn a living. The second question is tougher. But apart from Alex Garland's classic novel The Beach, the books I see most tourists reading in Thailand are the his-and-hers prison memoirs The Damage Done (convicted Australian heroin trafficker Warren...