Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth

(Hardback)

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From the bestselling author of Kleptopia comes a true story about Cuckooland a world where the rich can buy everything including the truth.
Everywhere, the powerful are making a renewed claim to the greatest prize of all: to own the truth. The power to choose what you want reality to be and impose that reality on the world.

For three years, Tom Burgis followed a lead that took him deeper and deeper into Cuckooland the place where the rich own the truth. The trail snaked from the Kremlin to Kathmandu, Stockholm to the Steppe, from a blood-soaked town square in Uzbekistan to a royal retreat in Scotland. Burgis hunted down oligarchs, developed secret sources and traced vast sums of money flowing between multinational corporations, ex-Soviet dictators and the wests ruling elites. And he found one man who wanted the power to bend reality to his will.

This book tells an astonishing story: a tale of secrets and lies that reveals how fragile that truth can be. Whether its in Kazakh torture chambers or the UKs High Court, the lords of Cuckooland are seizing control of the truth. They decree what stories may be told about war and money and power, what we are permitted to know and more importantly, what we are not.

From the bestselling author of Kleptopia, Cuckooland is a deeply reported work of non-fiction that reads like a thriller. It is a story of how globalisation and technological revolution have combined to imperil the foundation of free societies: that the truth belongs to the many, not the few.

Reviews

EARLY PRAISE FOR CUCKOOLAND

Burgiss book is a work of gripping, page-turning genius that deftly explains exactly how the super-rich have bought up our democracies and sought to hijack the truth by imposing their own versions of reality, engaging in lawfare to censor anyone who might challenge them. Oligarchs will read this book and weep at how their hollow tactics have been exposed

Catherine Belton, bestselling and prize-winning author of Putins People

PRAISE FOR BURGIS PREVIOUS BOOK KLEPTOPIA:

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Kleptopia by Tom Burgis is as advertised and more. A dizzying cats cradle of rampant awfulness'

Hugh Laurie

A ghastly and very important story

Guardian

A meticulously reported piece of investigative journalism written in the style of a fast-paced thriller Gripping Kleptopia is not a far away republic in central Asia; it is all around us

The Times

I dont do book reviews. But I am reading Kleptopia very slowly as I have to keep picking my jaw up off the floor Fascinating. Terrifying

Paul Lewis, finance expert

A must-read for anyone wanting to better understand what has already happened here in America and what lies ahead if Trump is reelected in November A magisterial account of the money and violence behind the worlds most powerful dictatorships Meticulously reported

Washington Post

The architects of our national security would do well to bring to their meetings a well-thumbed copy It unpicks the filthy flipside of globalisation

The Times

A hero straight out of a John le Carr novel Wonderfully if grimly entertaining

Economist

Author Bio

Tom Burgis won a fellowship at the Financial Times in 2006, and has worked on the paper ever since. He has reported from London, Brussels, South America and Africa, writing on the privation and conflict that accompanies the resource trade.His work has appeared in the Telegraph, the Independent, the Observer, the New Statesman, the Big Issue and Open Democracy, and in 2010 he was shortlisted for Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards.