The Haves and Have-Yachts

The Gilded Age had Mark Twain, the Jazz Age had F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Age of Trump, luckily, has Evan Osnos. In The Haves and the Have-Yachts, Osnos reveals the secret lives and preoccupations of America’s increasingly powerful oligarchs and probes their outsized impact on the rest of us. Osnos is an astute political reporter and a wonderful and witty stylist, making this menagerie of modern-day Robber Barons equal parts entertaining and appalling. Anyone trying to understand who really rules Trump’s America must read it.'  -- Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money
'National Book Award winner Osnos (Age of Ambition) provides an amusing and enraging glimpse into the lives of the überwealthy. In a series of essays originally published in the New Yorker, Osnos follows the 1% as they purchase 295-ft.-plus “gigayachts” (“the most expensive objects our species has ever owned”), plan to ride out the apocalypse in a “luxury apartment complex built in an underground Atlas missile silo,” and hire rapper Flo Rida for a bar mitzvah. The author also reveals how the upper echelons stay there – usually through innovative tax dodges like flying a jet to a business meeting to “maintain the claim that their trust was not run from California” – and how wannabes are relentless in their efforts to scam their way to the top, like an incarcerated Hollywood Ponzi schemer who plagiarizes motivational speakers on his prison blog. The best essays revel in the sheer ludicrousness of extreme wealth: “bored billionaires” hiring “experiential yachting” experts to stage a mock Battle of Midway or getting Zabar’s bagels delivered via helicopter. These over-the-top tales are balanced out by more conventional profiles and analyses, including an examination of Facebook’s “cult of growth.” While adding ample historical context (the first 'trusts' originated as a tax dodge for Crusaders), this succeeds most of all as an exposé of the grotesque excesses of the elite.' * Publishers Weekly *