The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

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. (June)