A Book(s) Review - Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World Book by Tom Burgis and Everybody Knows: Corruption in America Book by Sarah Chayes

If you think the UK isn't corrupt, you haven't looked hard enough ... A new and terrifying book, Kleptopia follows a global current of dirty money, and the murders and kidnappings required to sustain it’ George Monbiot, Guardian ‘When you pick this book up, you won’t be able to put it down’ Misha Glenny, author of McMafia ‘The architects of our national security would do well to bring to their meetings a well-thumbed copy of Kleptopia ... Incendiary’ Edward Lucas, The Times In this real-life thriller packed with jaw-dropping revelations, award-winning investigative journalist Tom Burgis reveals a terrifying global web of corruption. Kleptopia follows the dirty money that is flooding the global economy, emboldening dictators and poisoning democracies. From the Kremlin to Beijing, Harare to Riyadh, Paris to the Trump White House, it shows how the thieves are uniting – and the terrible human cost. A body in a burned-out Audi. Workers riddled with bullets in the Kazakh desert. A rigged election in Zimbabwe. A British banker silenced and humiliated for trying to expose the truth about the City of London – the world’s piggy bank for blood money. Riveting, horrifying and written like fiction, this book shows that while we are looking the other way, all that we hold most dear is being stolen. PUBLISHER: C Hurst & Company Publishers Limited, 2020 America is corrupted, and everybody knows it. Vested interests have bent government powers to serve themselves, not the citizens, with dizzying results -- egregious Supreme Court rulings, revolving doors and cozy deals between the state and the private sector, and forty years of financial meltdowns. In this blistering book, Sarah Chayes shows that today's corruption -- even the venality of the Trump administration -- is part of global history, going back to the invention of money itself. We're not dealing with 'bad apples' lining individual pockets, but the widespread standard practice of sophisticated networks spanning political and national boundaries. But we can change this, individually, collectively and politically. Searching and unflinching, 'Everybody Knows' exposes a rigged system that strangles democracy, calling on readers everywhere to challenge it.