The author is an accomplished novelist, a foreign correspondent, and, more to the point for the sake of this book, a son of privileged parents. (His father is rather accomplished himself, a storied magazine editor, poet, and the author of two fine memoirs.) This is Nick McDonell’s exploration of privilege and what it means both to be part of the 1 percent and, just as critically, to be part of the other 99 percent and how the system works to keep the offspring in their respective slots.
He evacuates his own past, growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, attending the elite private school Buckley and then Harvard before writing his first novel (a best-seller, of course) at age 17, and eventually heading to Iraq and Afghanistan as a war correspondent. Not exactly the path chosen by his peers, and he examines his life; the lives of his Buckley classmates and their thoughts on race, wealth, and power; and the lives of those less privileged whom he befriends along the way. He discovered, among other things, that wealth defined the selves of those who had it, and that the prospect of losing one’s riches meant the prospect of losing one’s identity.
