I'd heard of Browder, and heard him interviewed on Trumpcast talking about the Magnitsky act. The book has been praised quite a lot.

Perhaps necessarily, or the book would have been too short, there's a lot of Browders autobiography/career story before it gets to Magnitsky stuff. Basically he was a banker who spotted a way to make loads of money as Russia privatised all the state stuff, and he built his fortune from there. He seems to have no qualms whatsoever that his success is based on the fact that Russian people were getting fiddled - it's just a chance to make money. I guess everything he did was legal but it definitely feels morally suspect and I imagine that a lot of banker types make loads of money because they're prepared to exploit opportunities which other people would feel squeamish about.

At start of his Russian investment his success needs Yeltsin to win the election but Yeltsin's approval rating was just 14%(?). He meets some oligarchy type people who tell him "don't worry, it'll get sorted". Sure enough Yeltsin goes on to win the election. you're left with the impression that this isn't democracy in action - but Browder makes tons of money out of it anyway.

The way he describes his deals makes you think "there must be more too it than this - he must be leaving lots of detail out because it can’t be that simple" to make millions on the financial markets - but maybe it is. As in The Big Short, maybe it's just a case of the financial industry trying to make it sound complex and arcane.

His marriage fails because he spends all his time in Moscow. He seems fairly honest about his failings in the book but he does seem to blame her a bit and overall it feels like he was pretty selfish. He says "I know I shared at least half the blame" for the marriage failure. I’d put it at more than half based on his telling.

At one stage he buys a cd containing a database of info from some guy who's selling them in the street - this doesn't seem to strike him as ethically dubious (I highlighted kindle book). The database lets them see how much fiddling the oligarchs had done when selling each other bits of Gasprom etc.

He did use this info to expose and discredit oligarchs and did help sort out Gasprom.

The book seems very long! about 14 hours of audio I think

At the end of the book there's a postscript read by Browder himself (he doesn't narrate the audiobook). This made me realise how the narrator's voice had put me off a bit: he came across as a bit aggressive/forceful and not so intelligent/likeable, but Browder himself sounded like a much nicer person. Funny how the sound of a voice does that, because presumably they're all Browder's words. Anyway, the emotion and motivation that Browder expressed in his epilogue was very moving and I wanted to shake his hand after listening to it.

Overall I think the message of the book is very worthy but I think it might have been better if he'd used a professional writer to tighten it up a bit: there was a lot of detail in there about lots of the characters who were involved in various Russian shennanigans, and while I think you could argue it's important to lay out all the evidence, it felt like a bit of a slog to read it.

Completed : 07-Sep-2018 (audiobook)