Michael Franzese
Autor/a de Blood Covenant
Sobre l'autor
Michael Franzese is the founder of Breaking Out, LLC
Obres de Michael Franzese
I'll Make You an Offer You Can't Refuse: Insider Business Tips from a Former Mob Boss (NelsonFree) (2009) 35 exemplars
Quitting the Mob: How the "Yuppie Don" Left the Mafia and Lived to Tell His Story (1992) 14 exemplars
A Sit-Down with Michael Franzese 1 exemplars
Lições de Gestão de Um Ex-Patrão da Máfia 1 exemplars
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
Membres
Ressenyes
Potser també t'agrada
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 10
- Membres
- 195
- Popularitat
- #112,377
- Valoració
- 3.7
- Ressenyes
- 8
- ISBN
- 20
- Llengües
- 4
The main problem of this book is that it's all just surface level. Most of the time you're just reading "politician A got X amount of money through this scheme", and it got very old halfway through the book. Unless you are oblivious to the shenanigans of the American government, this won't really be a grand revelation. In that way, it can be an eye-opener, but if you have reached puberty, you probably already know that something is rotten in government.
The parallels to the mafia and Machiavelli are very surface level. Outside a few quotes here and there combined with a political scheme, it does not really do a lot for me. I would've liked it to truly dive into those to subjects, laying out the inner workings of the mafia in meticulous detail to drive the point home. The psychology behind Machiavelli in comparison to today's politics would also have been very interesting instead of just using a quote here and there.
The solutions the book offer are very surface level, they are basically just assertions, there's no underlying plan to implement them, which make it hard to separate them from a mere blogpost on the internet. Anybody can write a post that says, we should fix some loophole that politicians use. We must put a limit to the number of terms they can serve. Okay. How exactly? By voting in this sports-influenced red vs. blue political system? By voting for politicians that are already, or will become, corrupt when they realize the amount of money they can make?
One of the suggestions for improvement literally is "The rest, I'm afraid, is up to us. We must demand better"... Again, how? By writing moody posts on the internet? Making YouTube videos? Some of the ideas the book puts forward are truly good, but they're just ideas. There's no plan of implementation connected to them. It's also good to see that both political parties are under fire and that the author is not picking sides with improves its authenticity.
For this to truly have been impactful, instead of just writing the foreword, I think Rudy Giuliani should have been a co-author. Someone with a lot of experience within the government system who could actually lay out a direct plan to implement some of the ideas in this book.
Sources are also handled a bit weird. Usually, there are annotations at the end of a claim, but not in this book. The sources are listed at the end of the book and divided into chapters, which I thought was odd. I don't doubt that Mr. Franzese did his research, but it might be off-putting to some.
I read this book from a standpoint that the American government is among the most corrupt in the West, which I think the book supports. However, it does not do a lot more than that.
There is a lot of potential in this book because Franzese is correct with his assessment that the US government is acting like the mafia in many ways. In the end, the book's length is its worst enemy, as it does not even reach 200 pages if you detract the foreword and resources list. It is very limited what you can achieve with that little with a huge subject like this. At the end of the day, it really falls short of having any real impact beyond just exposing some numbers and schemes that made someone's wallet fat. A damn shame.… (més)