Madeeha Maqbool's Reviews > The Key Man

The middle of this book is seriously irritating and repeatedly putting Naqvi’s millions in “context” by saying “not bad for the boy from Karachi” frankly racist. The overall story is well told but constantly pushing a weirdly formed agenda by using figures like a person in Nigeria would earn this much in 48,000 years, is just strange, as is saying about every conclave (UN, WEF etc.) that there were no poor people there. Errrr, when have there ever been? I’m still giving the book 3 stars because of its comprehensive coverage but compared to “Bad blood” which I finished only a couple of days ago (I started the key man when I got it in August last year but shelved it because I wasn’t in the mood then), this is not a great book. ALSO, main peeve: the entire middle of the book, where the writers are giving sweeping statements about corruption etc, they fail to explain financial regulations and systems, even though these are way easier to comprehend for laypeople than medical and scientific things, and Carreyrou did a fabulously thoroughly job with the latter in his book.

The Epilogue is good though and has an interesting thesis about the vested and self indulgent intentions of billionaires’ investments to reduce poverty which cannot be a replacement for government spending.