D. Keith Mano

There’s a thing peculiar to felines called “third eyelid.” A cloudy membrane that will glide up/over each pupil. It’s the dead-sure symptom of mal de chaf: of disinterest in mice, in refrigerator door openings. I get third eyelid when presented with any book on economics, left-wing, right-wing, or old Princeton single-wing. Wave your watch, say “John Maynard Keynes” once, and I’m susceptible to post-hypnotic suggestion. In fact, you could leave the watch out. Yet I found It’s No Sin to Be Rich quite engrossing. Enjoyable, pungent: about as painful as love bites. Which made me think—prejudice or paranoia —that it can’t be a very important book.

Perhaps No Sin has too much of a “Wealthy Men I Have Known” swagger about it. There is, as well, the white sound heard in New Yorker profile writing: not full profiles, half a nose here, a weak chin there, three-paragraph rags-to-Gucci sketches. These do have their purpose, though. Davis, a British financial editor, means to prove that self-seeking energy and innovation —even gorgeous eccentricity—are valuable; that they depend on free market (or mixed free market) metabolism. Most radical artists will acknowledge this, at least implicitly. Play or novel, more often than not there has to be one Daddy Warbucks character with resources that could buy a 1978 Mercedes Deus ex Machina. This character is probably evil; he is also probably the one interesting force around. For art’s sake no theme will bore better than downtrodden masses; particularly when they unite chainless in an inconspicuous consumption of everything but rhetoric. Successful entrepreneurs fascinate; moreover, their will and capital Ex-Lax society’s sluggish digestive tract. Your worst leveler is curious about them: there are exploits in exploitation: Time, Inc. didn’t put out Prole magazine.

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There’s a thing peculiar to felines called “third eyelid.” A cloudy membrane that will glide up/over each pupil. It’s the dead-sure symptom of mal de chaf: of disinterest in mice, in refrigerator door openings. I get third eyelid when presented with any book on economics, left-wing, right-wing, or old Princeton single-wing. Wave your watch, say “John Maynard Keynes” once, and I’m susceptible to post-hypnotic suggestion. In fact, you could leave the watch out. Yet I found It’s No Sin to Be Rich quite engrossing. Enjoyable, pungent: about as painful as love bites. Which made me think—prejudice or paranoia —that it can’t be a very important book.

Perhaps No Sin has too much of a “Wealthy Men I Have Known” swagger about it. There is, as well, the white sound heard in New Yorker profile writing: not full profiles, half a nose here, a weak chin there, three-paragraph rags-to-Gucci sketches. These do have their purpose, though. Davis, a British financial editor, means to prove that self-seeking energy and innovation —even gorgeous eccentricity—are valuable; that they depend on free market (or mixed free market) metabolism. Most radical artists will acknowledge this, at least implicitly. Play or novel, more often than not there has to be one Daddy Warbucks character with resources that could buy a 1978 Mercedes Deus ex Machina. This character is probably evil; he is also probably the one interesting force around. For art’s sake no theme will bore better than downtrodden masses; particularly when they unite chainless in an inconspicuous consumption of everything but rhetoric. Successful entrepreneurs fascinate; moreover, their will and capital Ex-Lax society’s sluggish digestive tract. Your worst leveler is curious about them: there are exploits in exploitation: Time, Inc. didn’t put out Prole magazine.