Book Review: Too Famous

Available here.

At a dinner party last week, we were discussing the upcoming sentencing of Ghislaine Maxwell and the latest step in the Epstein Saga. I left the evening with a new long read.

Too Famous is a compilation of character studies of famous people over the last 20 years. Michael Wolff, a long time columnist at Vanity Fair and New York Magazine and mostly recently author of three books on the Trump White House, provides a fly-on-the-wall perspective from his years of reporting. Yes, he's biased. But he's honest about bias. He's a unique writer that has had a ton of access to inform his views. 

Do I recommend it to you? Yes, if the topic is of interest.

It's great writing, has moments of searing insight, and an original point of view. 

The introduction shares a reflection of where media is today: "The road here is a tragic one -- for the culture at large and, as well, for so many people who take it. But it is also the ventral thorough fare: you can't understand public life without understanding the motivation for ever-increasing and eternal notoriety and the mechanisms by which it is achieve, and, as the price you pay for it."

"Almost everyone herein has been burned, often badly, by the fame they have sought."

"Everyone in this book is a creature of, or creation of, the media. They don't exist as who we see them as, and who they want to be, without the media. They are actors, sometimes succeeding but often failing in their performances in the media's eyes."

The jewel is the final chapter titled "The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein." Here, Wolff's access in unparalleled. He has a conversation between Steve Bannon, Epstein, and a few advisors plotting how to turn around Epstein's image. In their mind, the sex scandal is a sideshow. Epstein says "But in the history of man, prostitution has either been not a criminal act or a misdemeanor -- even if it's a thousand times."

What is Jeffrey Epstein really about? Tax avoidance and sheltering wealth.

He says "I am one of the people involved in the philanthropic economy, one of the largest and fastest-growing parts of the world economy." Wolff later writers "his cynical but cheerful analysis was that, in the end, in the Gulf there was no real issue other than money, making it, hiding it, protecting it, making more of it."

Notably, the chapter doesn't mention Ghislaine Maxwell. She's not important to the Jeffrey Epstein story, but she will be punished for his crimes.