The Haves and Have-Yachts - by Evan Osnos (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author Evan Osnos comes a timely and provocative collection of essays exploring American oligarchy and the culture of excess, providing a wry, unfiltered look at how the ultrarich shape--and sometimes warp--our social and political landscape.

The ultrarich hold more of America's wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. Here, Evan Osnos's incisive reportage yields an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions driving this new Gilded Age, in which superyachts, luxury bunkers, elite tax dodges, and a torrent of political donations bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power.

With deft storytelling and meticulous reporting, this is a book about the indulgences, incentives, and psychological distortions that define our economic age. In each essay, Osnos delves into a world that is rarely visible, from the outrageous to the fabulous to the ridiculous: a private wealth manager who broke with members of an American dynasty and spilled their secrets; the pop stars who perform at lavish parties for thirteen-year-olds; the status anxieties that spill out of marinas in Monaco and Palm Beach like real-world episodes of Succession and The White Lotus; the ethos behind the largest Ponzi scheme in Hollywood history; the confessions of disgraced titans in a "white-collar support group." A celebrated political reporter, Osnos delves into the unprecedented Washington influence of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, drawing on in-depth interviews with Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires, about their power and the explosive backlash it stirs.

Originally published in The New Yorker, these essays have been revised and expanded to deliver an unflinching portrait of raw ambition, unimaginable fortune, and the rise of America's modern oligarchy. Osnos's essays are a wake-up call--a case against complacency in the face of unchecked excess, as the choices of the ultrarich ripple through our lives. Entertaining, unsettling, and eye-opening, The Haves and the Have-Yachts couldn't be more relevant to today's world.

Review Quotes

"A thoroughly reported and spryly narrated--and deeply maddening--tour of extreme wealth," --Kirkus Reviews

"An amusing and enraging glimpse into the lives of the überwealthy. . . . succeeds most of all as an exposé of the grotesque excesses of the elite." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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

About the Author

Evan Osnos has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. His most recent book, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury, was a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which won the National Book Award. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, where he shared two Pulitzer Prizes. He lives with his wife and children near Washington, DC.