Michael Hiltzik: In Michael Lewis, Sam Bankman-Fried found his last and most willing victim
The main hazard in telling a big story through the eyes of its main participant is the need to rely on his version as the honest truth.
Journalism schools will be able to use "Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon," Michael Lewis' new book about the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and the fall of its boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, as a textbook on the imperative need to approach a subject with a healthy helping of skepticism.
To make a long story short, in this book Lewis doesn't exercise any.
The result is what amounts to a defense brief for Bankman-Fried for his fraud trial in New York federal court, which opens Tuesday — coinciding, as it happens, with the publication date of Lewis' book.
Fortunately, readers interested in the story of the cryptocurrency scam and Bankman-Fried's rise and fall can turn to a much more convincing (and more entertaining) book. That's "Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall," by Zeke Faux, a financial investigative reporter for Bloomberg.
Faux demonstrates his incisive grasp of the story with the
