God's Bankers
Pages: 752
Edition: Hardcover
List Price: $32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster,
ISBN: 9781416576570
First entered: 28th, Mar 2015
Number of weeks: 1
Book Summary
A deeply reported, fast-paced exposé of the money and the cardinals-turned-financiers at the heart of the Vatican—the world’s biggest, most powerful religious institution—from an acclaimed journalist with “exhaustive research techniques” (The New York Times).
From a master chronicler of legal and financial misconduct, a magnificent investigation nine years in the making, this book traces the political intrigue and inner workings of the Catholic Church. Decidedly not about faith, belief in God, or religious doctrine, this book is about the church’s accumulation of wealth and its byzantine entanglements with financial markets across the world. Told through 200 years of prelates, bishops, cardinals, and the Popes who oversee it all, Gerald Posner uncovers an eyebrow-raising account of money and power in perhaps the most influential organization in the history of the world.
God’s Bankers has it all: a rare exposé and an astounding saga marked by poisoned business titans, murdered prosecutors, mysterious deaths of private investigators, and questionable suicides; a carnival of characters from Popes and cardinals, financiers and mobsters, kings and prime ministers; and a set of moral and political circumstances that clarify not only the church’s aims and ambitions, but reflect the larger dilemmas of the world’s more recent history. And Posner even looks to the future to surmise if Pope Francis can succeed where all his predecessors failed: to overcome the resistance to change in the Vatican’s Machiavellian inner court and to rein in the excesses of its seemingly uncontrollable financial quagmire. Part thriller, part financial tell-all, this book shows with extraordinary precision how the Vatican has evolved from a foundation of faith to a corporation of extreme wealth and power.
Authors
Name: Gerald Posner
Hometown: San Francisco
About the author:
Gerald Posner is an award winning journalist, bestselling author and attorney. The Los Angeles Times dubs him "a classic-style investigative journalist." "His work is painstakingly honest journalism" concluded The Washington Post. The New York Times lauded his "exhaustive research techniques" and The Boston Globe talked of Posner's "thorough and hard-edge investigation." "A meticulous and serious researcher," said the New York Daily News.
Posner's first book, Mengele, a 1986 biography of the Nazi "Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, was the result of a pro-bono lawsuit Posner brought on behalf of surviving twins from Auschwitz. Since then he has written ten other books from the Pulitzer Prize-finalist Case Closed, to bestsellers on political assassinations, organized crime, national politics, and 9/11 and terrorism. His upcoming God’s Bankers has spanned nine years of research and received early critical praise.
ohn Martin of ABC News says "Gerald Posner is one of the most resourceful investigators I have encountered in thirty years of journalism." Garry Wills calls Posner "a superb investigative reporter. "Posner, a former Wall Street lawyer, demolishes myths through a meticulous re-examination of the facts," reported the Chicago Tribune. "Meticulous research," Newsday.
Anthony Lewis in The New York Times: "With 'Killing the Dream, he has written a superb book: a model of investigation, meticulous in its discovery and presentation of evidence, unbiased in its exploration of every claim. And it is a wonderfully readable book, as gripping as a first-class detective story."
"What we need is a work of painstakingly honest journalism, a la Case Closed, Gerald Posner's landmark re-examination of the assassination of John F. Kennedy," concluded Joe Sharkey in The New York Times.
Gene Lyons, in Entertainment Weekly: "As thorough and incisive a job of reporting and critical thinking as you will ever read, Case Closed does more than buttress the much beleaguered Warren Commission's conclusion ….More than that, Posner's book is written in a penetrating, lucid style that makes it a joy to read. Even the footnotes, often briskly debunking one or another fanciful or imaginary scenario put forth by the conspiracy theorists, rarely fail to enthrall...Case Closed is a work of genuine patriotism and a monument to the astringent power of reason. 'A'"
Jeffrey Toobin in the Chicago Tribune: "Unlike many of the 2,000 other books that have been written about the Kennedy assassination, Posner's Case Closed is a resolutely sane piece of work. More importantly, 'Case Closed' is utterly convincing in its thesis, which seems, in light of all that has transpired over the past 30 years, almost revolutionary....I started Case Closed as a skeptic - and slightly put off by the presumptuous title. To my mind historical truth is always a slippery thing. The chances of knowing for sure what happened in any event - much less one as murky as the Kennedy assassination - seem remote. But this fascinating and important book won me over. Case closed, indeed."
Based in the mixed realms of politics, history, and true crime, his articles - from The New York Times to The New Yorker to Newsweek, Time and The Daily Beast - have prompted Argentina to open its hidden Nazi files to researchers; raised disturbing questions about clues the FBI missed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; sparked a reinvestigation of the Boston Strangler; and exposed Pete Rose's gambling addiction, which led to his ban from baseball.
Posner was one of the youngest attorneys (23) ever hired by Cravath, Swaine & Moore. A Political Science major, Posner was a Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of California at Berkeley (1975), where he was also a national debating champion, winner of the Meiklejohn Award. At Hastings Law School (1978), he was an Honors Graduate and served as the Associate Executive Editor for the Law Review. Of Counsel to Posner & Ferrar