{"id":23290,"date":"2026-05-24T16:16:53","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T00:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=23290"},"modified":"2026-05-24T16:17:36","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T00:17:36","slug":"london-falling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2026\/05\/24\/london-falling\/","title":{"rendered":"London Falling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family&#039;s Search for Truth\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"500\" height=\"550\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"clipboard-write\" style=\"max-width:100%\" src=\"https:\/\/read.amazon.com\/kp\/card?asin=B0FGZYTRP1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This is one of the two best-reviewed books of the year.<\/p>\n<p>As for the other, &#8220;Transcription&#8221;&#8230;forget about it.<\/p>\n<p>Now &#8220;London Falling&#8221; is nonfiction whereas &#8220;Transcription&#8221; is fiction, and I vastly prefer fiction, but&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>There was an interesting article in the &#8220;Wall Street Journal&#8221;&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Dad Books Are a Dying Breed &#8211; Sales have been sliding for nonfiction titles about politics, biographies and other books often aimed at men&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/apple.news\/AnbzaXId_RZivL_4P9Sp3gg<\/p>\n<p>The writer posits a theory about podcasts and other internet diversions having eviscerated the sale of nonfiction Dad Books, but traditionally these are the ones most males want to read. Actually, women not only dominate fiction, they dominate book-buying entirely. But the kinds of books women purchase run the gamut from romance to literature and&#8230;just because it&#8217;s on the best-seller list that does not mean I&#8217;m recommending males read it. And I am recommending fiction to males, because usually you&#8217;ll learn more about life in these made-up stories than real ones, but&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>To tell you the state of the business, according to the WSJ article above the number one selling fiction book, the romantasy (how do you like that for a genre) &#8220;Rites of the Starling sold 105,396 copies while the number one nonfiction title &#8220;London Falling&#8221; only sold 13,468.<\/p>\n<p>Then again, &#8220;Rites of the Starling&#8221; was a sequel.<\/p>\n<p>But &#8220;London Falling&#8221; was written by Patrick Radden Keefe, who wrote &#8220;Say Nothing&#8221;&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Now if you haven&#8217;t seen &#8220;Say Nothing&#8221; on FX\/Hulu, dial it right up, it&#8217;s one of the great series, and therefore when I started to read the book thereafter, I stopped, because although it was detailed and interesting, did I truly want to spend all that time learning about what was delineated so clearly in a series?<\/p>\n<p>And I started to see &#8220;London Falling&#8221; written about everywhere and when I realized it was written by Patrick Radden Keefe, I immediately reserved it at the library. And I was stunned Libby delivered it so quickly, but I was still hesitant to read a nonfiction tome. Especially after finishing Joanna Stern&#8217;s &#8220;I Am Not a Robot.&#8221; So I dove into Elizabeth Strout&#8217;s book, but that cut like butter, and after I finished it in twenty four hours&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I realized it was now or never. I decided to give &#8220;London Falling&#8221; a shot, not believing I was really going to get through it, but very soon I was hooked.<\/p>\n<p>The book starts by telling the history of London and the Thames. About shipping and redevelopment&#8230; The funny thing is everybody expects everything to last forever, for nothing to change. The industries flourishing today, the jobs you have today, should last at least until you&#8217;re six feet under. Actually, we have an entire political party based on returning us to a past that was not that good to begin with and really isn&#8217;t coming back. As for the facts, wind power is flourishing everywhere but the U.S., as well as electric cars, and despite being allowed to buy Nvidia AI chips China has so far refused to do so and&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve been to London, this book will make the landscape make sense.<\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s a feature of this book. Just when the narrative hits an inflection point, when you&#8217;re ready for the story to move right along suddenly there are endless pages of history. But after consuming them, you realize they&#8217;re integral to the story and informative to boot. This makes &#8220;London Falling&#8221; different from your average nonfiction book, which tends to be the facts and nothing but the facts. And it&#8217;s these historical diversions that set the mood, that take you away. If you want an escape from your everyday life, read &#8220;London Falling,&#8221; from the first instant you&#8217;ll be in another world with another mood and&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The issue is quite clear and put forth right away. A nineteen year old falls from a building to his death. What exactly happened?<\/p>\n<p>But to get into the nitty-gritty, you&#8217;ve got to dive into the family. On both sides the parents&#8217; fathers are Holocaust survivors. One a famous rabbi. How did that affect their lives?<\/p>\n<p>And the parents want to keep the story hush-hush, afraid it&#8217;s going to negatively impact their image, the tabloids seeing a death like this as raw meat.<\/p>\n<p>But still, they&#8217;re looking for answers.<\/p>\n<p>As for Scotland Yard&#8230; Is it just ineptitude and certain avenues were not explored or were they protecting the oligarchs?<\/p>\n<p>We don&#8217;t have that in the U.S., the Russian oligarchs. And until the law recently changed, they had non-dom status, which ultimately meant they paid no taxes, even the wife of the prime minister had this status, which is one reason the law was finally changed. But the bottom line is even more than Manhattan, many of the multimillion dollar domiciles are uninhabited, not only buildings, but neighborhoods can be a veritable ghost land. As for who actually owns these properties&#8230; Good luck trying to find out, because the owner is rarely the person who seems to use the apartment when they actually do, you&#8217;ve got corporations and trusts and offshore accounts and&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Now according to Balzac:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This leads to another concept the average person either does not know or cannot wrap their head around&#8230;that so many of the rich are essentially judgment-proof. You can get a decision in court, but good luck collecting, like in this book, there are rich people who on paper are destitute.<\/p>\n<p>So what exactly went on here and who is at fault?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t want to reveal anything, I&#8217;ll just say after finishing this book I was ultimately satisfied. But that does not mean those responsible may not have skated.<\/p>\n<p>So it&#8217;s like &#8220;London Falling&#8221; exists in an alternative world, it&#8217;s not exactly highbrow, but it&#8217;s so well done, and not simplified for the reader, such that it puts conventional works to shame. I had a hard time getting into another book after reading &#8220;London Falling.&#8221; I could read &#8220;London Falling&#8221; for the rest of my life and be happy. I mean books like this, that are not only about life, but how it works.<\/p>\n<p>We all have families, we all have backgrounds, we have personal narratives and&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Does anybody really know one&#8217;s child? The point is made here that when you&#8217;re exposed to someone&#8217;s search history you&#8217;re surprised. But it&#8217;s not only nineteen year old boys, but everybody.<\/p>\n<p>I can recommend &#8220;London Falling&#8221; to everybody. I won&#8217;t say it cuts like butter from word one, but it&#8217;s not hard to read and just after you get through the history of the Thames and the present day narrative begins, you&#8217;re hooked.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is one of the two best-reviewed books of the year. As for the other, &#8220;Transcription&#8221;&#8230;forget about it. Now &#8220;London Falling&#8221; is nonfiction whereas &#8220;Transcription&#8221; is fiction, and I vastly prefer fiction, but&#8230; There was an interesting article in the &#8220;Wall Street Journal&#8221;&#8230; &#8220;Dad Books Are a Dying Breed &#8211; Sales have been sliding for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-63E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23290"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23292,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23290\/revisions\/23292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}