Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #339747 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-27
• Released on: 2002-10-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Books in Canada
I wouldn't want to be rich, not for all the money in the world. That's not to say that like you I wouldn't mind having a little more to hand, a couple of million, say, perhaps even five.
But that's not rich. Not really rich. Even $10 million is considered only "junior wealth" by New York bankers, Richard Conniff informs us in his absorbing and amusing natural history of the sub-species he terms Homo sapiens pecuniosis.
And even though Conniff considers that "somewhat less than a $1 million a year would do quite nicely," it's barely walking-around money for the stars in his field guide. These people aren't merely rich. They're dirty rotten filthy stinking rich. And it's not enough.
Consider Nelson Peltz, who, thanks to leveraged buy-outs orchestrated by the notorious Michael Milken, is worth $970 million. Impressive, but as Conniff notes, "just painfully shy of the magical 'b' word." And as Peltz laments, "you see these guys worth $3 billion to $4 billion and you think to yourself, 'What have I done wrong?'"
Well-fixed though he is, poor Peltz is suffering from "relative deprivation", the shocking realization that no matter how much one has, someone else has more. Unless you're Bill Gates, that is. And even if you are, there's always "somebody who threatens to be richer toiling close behind."
So what a fertile field of study this turns out to be for Conniff. And well qualified he is to plow it. He has spent two decades writing about the natural world for National Geographic and Smithsonian and has contributed "articles on distinctly unnatural-seeming subjects" to Architectural Digest. "... I have alternated between writing about the rich and the bestial," he explains in his introduction.
Here he happily gets to marry the two, finding analogies in their behaviour while at the same time acknowledging "that one can only take this so far." But the very rich themselves have compared their behaviour to that of animals. John D. Rockefeller confessed to feeling like a caged lion prior to a predatory business raid; another tycoon described the joy of acquisition to being like a mosquito in a nudist colony: "It all looks so good I don't know where to start."
Researchers studying any species tend to pay special attention to the dominant individuals, Conniff says. In humans that generally means the rich. And with so much more at stake, they've developed some "distinctly unsavory survival mechanisms" (as well as more savory ones, he allows) that they express with a special intensity seldom found among us more placid proles.
Hence the rich as his natural choice for a natural history. It's a journalistic expedition rather than an academic enterprise, rich (ahem) in anecdote and acute observation.
The most obvious is that the rich get more candy. In fact, they get more of anything they want whenever they want it. And it does change one, doesn't it? As it does the howler monkey, who when blessed with more food and higher status is blessed with more sex, and the female opossum, who starts to produce more sons and fewer daughters.
And then they get into "extra-pair copulation", like the female bluebird and, very likely it turns out, Jennie Jerome, mother of Winston Churchill, and, very definitely, Pamela Harriman, whose long list of lovers was so distinctive that that itself was seductive. (I recall that a British magazine claimed that each tryst was itemised in her obituary in The Times "right down to whose footprints were on the windscreen.")
Like the rest of us who tend to hang around in groups—lining up with workmates in the staff cafeteria, having a Blue down at the Legion, discussing Ruskin with the other teens at the mall—the rich tend to hang out together.
Thus you'll find them swanning at Aspen, Lyford Cay, Palm Beach, St. Moritz, Majorca, the Hotel du Cap on the Med, San Carlos de Bariloche, the Argentinian resort where Ted Turner goes to ski. They "live large" high on the mountain, down at the water's edge, along the avenue, moving from one mansion or villa or penthouse to another as the whim or the season takes them.
And always there's the need for the alpha-males to show themselves as dominant personalities. Many are taller, healthier and noisier, much like the bullfrogs who belch to scare off rivals and attract "discriminating females in search of Big Daddy." It's known among biologists as "deep croak" and among its practitioners Conniff cites such contemporary fortune-builders as the producer David Geffen, Ted Turner, Andy Grove of Intel and Henry Nicholas, the co-founder of Broadcom Corp., all given to screaming diatribes.
So naturally we tend to flatter them. It's the equivalent of a subordinate baboon lipping burrs from the hindquarters of a dominant female, Conniff explains, rather unflatteringly. Burr-lipping and louse-picking and other forms of grooming are among the chief tools for social climbing among primates. We do so much of it for the rich that they take flattery for granted, though that doesn't necessarily mean we're wasting our time, or theirs.
"It may be that the rich don't notice how important flattery is in their lives because it is so routine, so institutionalised."
For those who aspire, Conniff concludes with "something like An Alpha Ape's Ten Rules for Living Wisely in an Imperfect World." The first is to get to know the three big lies of the sub-species: "I'm not really interested in money"; "Power doesn't matter to me"; and "I don't give a damn about impressing other people."
Conniff, who actually rented a Ferrari F355 Spider convertible at $1,200 U.S. a day to prowl among the rich in Los Angeles, found another set of personal rules posted at the ranch hideaway of a wealthy lawyer. "Do not talk politics," they began. "Do not talk business. Do not hustle elected officials. Eat when you are hungry. Piss anywhere."
They were clearly the work of a dominant individual, Conniff had learned to realise. And whatever you do, don't believe the last of his rules. For they contained a distinct hidden message: "Scent-mark here, and you will be eaten alive."
Michael Hanlon (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
"It might be difficult to see the connection between a rich woman swanning around in her Manolo Blahniks and some underpaid clipboard-wielding biologist slogging through the bush in battered Tevas," Conniff writes, but readers of this unusual and delightful exploration of the richest members of the human species will understand that connection and a whole lot more. Journalist and essayist Conniff compares the super-rich to the animal kingdom in providing a frame of reference for their behaviors and actions. Butterflies and moths, which camouflage their true colors when not with their own kind, provide a context for discussing concealment, display and the "inconspicuous consumption" of those born to money: the signs of wealth are displayed subtly to be recognized by those in the know. Conniff finds an animal model for philanthropy in a bird called the Arabian babbler, which, after forcing a gift of food on a companion, "lift[s] his beak in a special trill... like a socialite posing for an event photographer at the Breast Cancer Awareness barbecue." Other chapters provide insight into mating habits, dominance (the rough way and the nice way) and other rules of social intercourse. A keen observer of both animal and human nature, Conniff who has written about the natural world for National Geographic and about the rich for Architectural Digest neither patronizes nor demeans his subjects (after all, he notes, we all hope to be rich some day). He merely uses them and the natural world to illuminate a class of people and range of behaviors that few among us will ever have the opportunity to observe firsthand. 8 pages of b&w illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Conniff takes on lifestyles of the rich (and variably famous) for the bookish and hip, that is, for an audience receptive to his jokes. And the jokes fill every page of the very funny, vaguely nausea-inducing travels he makes through the realms of the extremely wealthy, who do, of course, turn out to be very different from you and me. As Conniff finally has it, we are all pretty much the same, except that the billionaires beat us in every category, including access to sex, overhousing, and general nastiness. Conniff (Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales from the Invertebrate World), a respected freelance journalist on the popular natural world beat, here extends to book length a piece he did on the culture of Monaco for National Geographic a few years back. Most conventional of the allegedly wise ideas he gleefully whacks are that old money is classier than new and that the rich mean it when they say there is more to their lives than money and power. Recommended for libraries of all types, with two caveats: Conniff is not immune to small errors of detail, and some of his humor is too deadpan to let readers distinguish outrageous hyperbole from assertion of fact. Even so, most will find this a fast-moving, instructive read.
Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.