Outrageous Fortunes

A Harvard-trained economist's startling predictions reveal critical challenges in the decades ahead, helping individuals, businesses, and governments to make smarter decisions As individuals, companies, and countries struggle to recover from the economic crisis, many are narrowly focused on forecasts for the next week, month, or quarter. Yet they should be asking what the global economy will look like in the years to come—where will the long-term risks and opportunities arise? These are the questions that Daniel Altman confronts in his provocative and indispensable book. The fate of the global economy, Altman argues, will be determined by deeper factors than those that move markets from moment to moment. His incisive analysis brings together hidden trends, societal pressures, and policy endgames to make twelve surprising but logical predictions about the years ahead. And his forecasts for the future raise a pressing question for today: With so many challenges awaiting us, are our political and economic institutions up to the task? Outrageous Fortunes tells which industries will grow, which economies will crumble, which investments will pay off, and where the next big crisis may occur. Altman's carefully reasoned text is an essential guide for the road ahead.

“Michael Gross’s new book…packs [in] almost as many stories as there are apartments in the building. The Jackie Collins of real estate likes to map expressions of power, money and ego… Even more crammed with billionaires and their exploits than 740 Park” (Penelope Green, The New York Times). With two concierge-staffed lobbies, a walnut-lined library, a lavish screening room, a private sixty-seat restaurant offering residents room service, a health club complete with a seventy-foot swimming pool, penthouses that cost almost $100 million, and a tenant roster that’s a roll call of business page heroes and villains, Fifteen Central Park West is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century. In this “stunning” (CNN) and “deliciously detailed” (Booklist, starred review) New York Times bestseller, journalist Michael Gross turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland that’s sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Mixing an absorbing business epic with hilarious social comedy, Gross “takes another gossip-laden bite out of the upper crust” (Sam Roberts, The New York Times), whichincludes Denzel Washington, Sting, Norman Lear, top executives, and Russian and Chinese oligarchs, to name a few. And he recounts the legendary building’s inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially déclassé Manhattan neighborhood. More than just an apartment building, 15CPW represents a massive paradigm shift in the lifestyle of New York’s rich and famous—and is a bellwether of the city’s changing social and financial landscape.

Leeds Castle, once home to kings and queens, was a place of spectacular opulence and luxury, and it was here that Anthony Russell spent his childhood; a childhood beyond the reaches of ordinary imagination. Away from the extravagance, the embrace of his nanny and the strong but distant love of his mother, Anthony's childhood was often lonely and fraught with the pressures of upholding the 'Castle Way', unwritten rules that were, perhaps, not the best preparation for life outside the castle walls. The polite reserve of his sheltered existence was inevitably ruptured by the arrival of the 1960s, with its new music, mores, and social freedoms; things both alluring and alarming to a young man who had spent his youth in splendid isolation. Uniquely entertaining, Outrageous Fortune is an extraordinary memoir, an accessible and personable account of how the 'other half ' lives, and a real-life Downton Abbey. As he documents his life at Leeds Castle, Anthony Russell gives us a vivid and intimate glimpse into a fascinating world gone by.

Navigating through troubled times is often fearful, terrifying, and disappointing. We want to make decisions that move us along, but we are also fearful about making the wrong choice. Especially, during this pandemic we are fearful about our lives being touched by others, but with a deep desire to stay connected. These meditations trace the emotional upheaval of our struggle as well as provide hopeful solace in the struggle itself. Philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, spiritual advisors, and theologians are useful sources to this journey. In my endeavor to clarify and advance the singularity of our struggle, I have gleaned from many of those listed above. But most of all I have endeavored to dive into my own vulnerability, connecting myself to the human struggle for security and love.

Inspired by the most infamous incident involving the Getty family - now a major film directed by Ridley Scott, starring Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Williams and Oscar® Nominee Christopher Plummer Oil tycoon J. Paul Getty created the greatest fortune in America - and came close to destroying his own family in the process. Of his four sons who reached manhood, only one survived relatively unscathed. One killed himself, one became a drug-addicted recluse and the third had to bear the stigma all his life of being disinherited in childhood. The unhappiness continued into the next generation, with the name Getty, as one journalist put it, 'becoming synonymous for family dysfunction'. Getty's once favourite grandson John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the Italian mafia who cut off his ear to raise a ransom and, after a lifetime of drink and drugs, became a paraplegic. His granddaughter Aileen has AIDS. And the Getty family itself has been torn apart by litigation over their poisoned inheritance. But did the disaster have to happen? John Pearson, who has specialized in biographies of families as varied as the Churchills, the British Royal Family, the Devonshires and the Krays, sets out to find the answer. The result, first published in 1995, is a fascinating saga of an extraordinary dynasty. He traces much of the trouble to the bizarre character of the avaricious, sex-obsessed billionaire, J. Paul Getty himself - and demonstrates how much of his behaviour has been repeated in succeeding generations. He describes the famous kidnapping of his grandson in graphic detail, revealing how the old man's attitude added considerably to the boy's sufferings. And he shows how the family has coped with the latest modern scourges: drugs and AIDS. For All the Money in the World is not a hopeless story. While some of the family have been damaged by the Getty legacy, others have saved themselves from disaster, most notably the cricket-loving philanthropist, J. Paul Getty Jr. Pearson's moving story of his recovery from drugs and deep personal tragedy shows that there is hope for future generations of this stricken family - and demonstrates that money can be used to buy survival and even happiness.

Did Ireland produce a more radical and ambitious literature in the straitened circumstances of the first half of the twentieth century than it has managed to do since it began to ‘modernize’ and become more affluent from the 1960s onwards? Has Irish modernism ceded place to a prevailing naturalism that seems gritty and tough-minded, but that is aesthetically conservative and politically self-thwarted? Does the fixation with ‘de Valera’s Ireland’ in recent narrative represent a necessary settling of accounts with a dark, abusive history or is it indicative of a worrying inability on the part of Irish artists and intellectuals to respond to the very different predicaments of the post-Cold War world? These are some of the questions addressed in Outrageous Fortune. Scanning literature, theatre, film and music, Joe Cleary probes the connections between capital, culture and criticism in modern Ireland. He includes readings of James Joyce and the Irish modernists, the naturalists Patrick Kavanagh, John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, and comments too on what he terms the ‘neo-naturalism’ of Marina Carr, Patrick McCabe and Martin McDonagh. He concludes with a provocative analysis of the cultural achievement of the Pogues.