Customer Reviews

The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Conniff, in writing this light, well researched book of comic sociology, makes interesting links between his observations in the natural world for National Geographic and his observations of the rich while working for Architectural Digest. Although I think Conniff, on balance, focuses more on the rich than on the parallels between the animal kingdom and the richs' behavior, this isn't a big flaw, at least to me -- I'd rather know a little more about billionaires' lives than a little more about the sex lives of the bonobos. Overall, I'd recommend this book.

Throughout the book, Conniff traces the behaviour of the rich and of various animal species, he shows that territoriality, social hierarchy, pecking orders, and competition for mates aren't just confined to the animal kingdom. Indeed, the natural laws of power and association are two major areas we have in common with our animal brethren.

He notes that the rich, as well as animals, know that power, control of resources and social dominance is what it's all about, despite any of their claims to the contrary. One must be confident, have good posture, walk straight, look people right in the eye, go directly after what one wants, and remember it's all about winning-winning-winning. The richs' influential friends, big houses, glamorous hobbies are all signs of dominance, as is a single-minded determination to impose one's vision on the world.

Conniff also points out that the softer side of domination is that of association. The rich know that "you are who you know." One must make friends shrewdly, cultivate allies, go to the right schools, live in the right neighborhoods, give to socially desirable charities, throw parties and invite all the right people. For humans, social intelligence is as important for survival as navigational skills are for arctic turns. Knowing the right people, places, pleasures - the sorts of things a rich person should know - is the only reliable badge of admission among the rich. And realize that the rich aren't out to impress the masses - the rich want to impress other rich people, not those far down the pecking order. Wanting to impress the masses is like a peacock wanting to impress a dog.

Finally, Conniff explores the age old question, "Is the world inhabited by the rich different?" Of course there are more comforts; the rich enjoy what the world has to offer, and family dynasties give heirs a sense of continuity and tradition. But the downside is that although wealth might not change you, it most surely changes the way people treat you. The rich are used to people sucking up to them, and expect but are suspicious of being flattered by their servants, friends, and potential allies. Also, the rich tend to socialize amongst themselves, and experience a sort of social isolation, going to the same restaurants, vacationing in the same spots, dating other "suitable" rich people, intermarrying amongst themselves. Through all these behaviors, they slowly dissolve anything they have in common with most other people, so being rich can be lonely. They live as birds in gilded cages.

Overall, this was a good light read. Recommended.

We are interested in what rich people do. They make the big homes, and the big deals, and have the fanciest clothes and the best choice in dates. We enjoy it when they do things that are silly, stupid, or mistaken. In doing so, we are really doing nothing more than our hominid ancestors did in paying close attention to the chiefs of their tribes; they may not have had money back then, but they had the status and they were carefully watched because of it. Interest in the rich is programmed in our genes. Thus it is a delight to find that the rich can be studied as objects of natural curiosity. Richard Conniff usually writes about other species, but has taken the techniques of the naturalist to study the habits of _homo sapiens peconiosus_ (rich people) in _The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide_ (Norton). He writes that instead of animals in the field, he "... had found a new quarry, and they were possibly the most dangerous and elusive animals on earth." Throughout his witty and informative book, he shows a great sense of fun with his evaluation of this extraordinary species.

Conniff gives us many views of rich people acting like animals. The analogies are often easily drawn and obvious. This should not be surprising. Successful tribal animals from all species are driven by "the quest for control, dominance, mating opportunities, and, above all, status." The rich are predatory like jungle cats, or busy with penile displays, like monkeys. It seems that many rich men are addicted to peeing in relatively public places as a show of domination. Ted Turner, who shows up often in this book, gave away a billion dollars to the UN, and disdained his fellow rich people who weren't, in his opinion, doing their share, as he quite ostentatiously was. A virtue is more of a virtue if it is performed privately and not for show, but the rich don't play the game that way any more than other primates do; what he had done was make a "bid for status, as plain as the chest-thumping of rival silverback gorillas." The rich maintain that they already have it made and they don't have any need to impress anyone, but that's not the way they behave: "...they usually mean only that they have drastically narrowed down the list of people they are interested in impressing." Other rich people, or ghosts of doubting fathers or teachers.

Part of the fun of the book is that Conniff knows a wealth of examples to draw upon, and there is lots to learn about what we usually take to be animals as well as rich people. For instance, in discussing the way rich men have arranged for other men not to make attempts on their wives ("mate guarding"), he informs us about dragon flies. Anyone who has seen dragonflies knows that they spend some of their time flying in tandem, with the male locked onto the female. It is wrong to assume they are enjoying in-flight coitus; probably they already got that out of the way, but the male is sticking to his mate until she lays her eggs so that other males don't get to her beforehand. So various behaviors of the rich (kin selection, altruism, status symbols, territoriality, scent marking, hoarding) amusingly can be found in some much lower species. The ease of the analogies is partially due to the baroque variations of behavior found all over the animal kingdom; one can find some species somewhere doing almost anything, and another doing the opposite. In fact, when analogizing the way rich grooms give presents to brides, Conniff tells about the male hangingfly who presents an edible morsel to a prospective mate, but warns, "The leap from hangingflies to humans is of course perilous." Just so, but such leaps are entertaining as well. Conniff's examination of the rich is not a scientific study as much as it is a bunch of funny stories about how odd those rich people are, stories made funnier by finding that they behave in ways just like other animals do.

I agree with the previous reviewer. If you are like me, always on the lookout for a not-too-serious books in a sociology section, you may enjoy it, as well. I am giving this book four stars only because at some point the zoology comparisons can wear you out.

What shocked me most about this book is how... smart it is! The author, Richard Conniff, writes for everything from "National Geographic" to "Architectural Digest" and is obviously "in the know" on the side. As a result, he comes off as very intelligent and witty, and I learned more about animal behavior than I did about human behavior.

Yes, it is a very witty book. But it also has a serious streak. He backs up his stories of gluttony and excess with anecdotal science from the natural world. He adds just enough history of the rich to provide a firm background and to show that some things just never change.

You might be embarrassed to be seen reading it, but it's definately worth picking up. It's fascinating to see how the other .0001% live, and I guarentee you'll learn something.

Put away your highlighter and pen. This is not a serious book. You won't be taking notes.

Instead, relax and prepare to enjoy some malicious gossip: a vicious, little joke. Conniff's tome is similar to the middle class matron who begins a joke with, "Did you hear the one about the rich guy, who...?" It is vindictive. It is mean-spirited. It paints with too broad a brush to be accurate. It appeals to our baser instincts. ...AND IT IS FUN!

This is the most amusing book that I've read in years. Enjoy!

Many people like believe that we (in the west) live in egalitarian societies where everyone has an equal opportunity to "make it". Certainly this notion is in the best interests of the government, and arguably society as a whole, because "without hope, the people perish". In other words, it is beneficial to promote the idea that anyone can make it into the realms of the rich, rather than promote the idea (some would say reality) that most people can not and will not. In this way the "have nots" will be more tolerable of the "haves" and society can march along in an orderly manner. But is this really the case?

This book certainly covers these concepts and a lot more. The book looks at the rich, who they are and how they have maintained, or at least tried to maintain, their status from generation to generation. It looks at what it really means to be rich and examines much of the behaviour attributed to rich people. Think Richard Branson risking his life in balloons, for example. The book draws heavily on parallels with studies of the animal kingdom, particularly primates, and does focus on the "alpha male" concept and the "display behaviour" concept to explain much of the observed behaviour. However I don't consider this to be a negative as there is no need to keep inventing new ideas just for the sake of doing so, especially if the current ideas suffice. The chapter on benevolent and charitable behaviour of the rich was interesting and possibly the only chapter than was a little difficult to digest. However in my experience this sort of behaviour often disrupts otherwise sound theories and this book is no different.

All in all, I found this book an enjoyable read. It certainly is written with tongue firmly in cheek and does get a bit monotonous over the last couple of chapters but provides some interesting ideas that counter our current PC/egalitarian mythology.

The author has written the kind of book he was undoubtedly aiming at: a light mix of believe-it-or-not anecdotes about rich people and believe-it-or-not biological observations, organized into a loose structure that explores both the cultural and sociological aspects of individual themes (display by grandstanding, display by muted extravagance, and so on) each explored for the length of a chapter. I didn't put up much of a fight against the overall thesis -- that it should be possible to use the same techniques and theories to explore the behavior of very wealthy people that are used to study exotic animals -- so I wasn't caught by surprise that the approach basically worked.

Conniff is a good writer. Sometimes he seemed to work too hard to force a reaction from the reader, but more often he made me laugh with an unexpected wry observation. He had the good sense to keep himself mostly out of the picture after the introduction and allow us to focus on his "prey". As for the rigor of his scientific descriptions, however, I was disappointed to find that he mischaracterized the gist of Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene," claiming that Dawkins talked about individuals trying to maximize their genes' propagation. In fact, Dawkins' novel perspective is that alleles (variant forms of a gene) can be viewed as trying to propagate themselves, albeit not in a conscious or goal-oriented way. Conniff is by no means the first to misquote Dawkins' theories, but I would expect better from a scientist than this kind of laziness. In the same way that you tend to distrust a newspaper in general when you read an article it publishes about your next-door neighbor and you see that the reporter got key facts wrong, I didn't feel as though I could rely a hundred percent on Conniff's statements about the work of scientists I was unfamiliar with. On the other hand, a certain amount of skepticism in approaching any popular science writer is probably a good thing. It should also be said that the book was well edited and revealed no noticeable typos or awkward wording, which has not been the case with a number of books I've read recently.

Conniff does not dwell to any great extent on "what it all means" in a political or ethical sense, but even his passing references to unhappy wives (such as Consuelo Vanderbilt, a virtual prisoner of her estate), frustrated suitors (such as the roughly 80% of beta males in some species who never mate), and squandered beauty (the classic hunting lodge torn down to build Blenheim Palace) mean that you're best off if you can distance yourself from the actual suffering caused by the excess and belligerence of the alpha humans and non-humans alike. While Conniff briefly suggests that there might be a negative environmental impact of tearing down enormous mansions to produce even bigger ones, he doesn't quantify it. Here and there he cites an example of a wasteful private jet trip (5500 gallons of fuel to take Elvis Presley to Denver and back for a peanut butter, jelly, and bacon sandwich, or $100,000 for a producer to take friends down to the Galapagos to see the filming of a nature documentary for a few hours), but he doesn't delve into the overall impact of such behavior.

Conniff ends the book with a sort of "how-to" epilogue with guidelines for how to act like a rich person. I see that he has expanded upon this theme in later books. With such guidelines as "move ruthlessly and without warning against your superiors", I'm not so sure that I particularly want to. But if the purpose of the book is to allow its readers, most of whom will probably not be rich, a brief laugh at wealthy humans and dominant animals before returning to their lives in the middle or bottom of the pack, it succeeds.

Richard Conniff's book is a rare find these days: imaginative, witty, intelligent, informative, clear, engrossing to the very end, and often laugh-out-loud funny. I recommend it highly and look forward to reading whatever the talented Mr. Conniff is planning next.

Richard Conniff is one of my favorite writers and this current offering is just as intellectually stimulating and entertaining as any of his previous works. Enjoy a walk on the wild side while Mr. Conniff explores our animal nature as it pertains to the most wealthy among us. Travel back to a time when wealth was not measured in monetary terms as we know it now but in such things as exotic foods offered to guests and how great a party you could throw. Insightful theories as to how the rich became rich and how they remain rich coupled with the observation of behaviors that echo our ape ancestors sets this literary effort apart from your usual sociological exploration. This well written and humorous effort deserves a standing ovation and a cry of BRAVO!

Richard Conniff is the sort of author that makes you want to run out and buy every book he's ever written and then immediately go a vacation just to read them. Educated, witty, wry, and informative, this book is a perfect example of what makes Mr. Conniff's work such a delight to read. Part natural history and part social commentary, it is completely engaging from page one. Mr. Conniff brings his considerable talents as a naturalist and journalist to the task of making sense of the bizarre behaviors of the very rich. It's Mr. Conniff at his best: an excellent (and very funny) read. If you don't recognize yourself, someone you know, or at least someone you have read about, in this revealing and entertaining analysis then you must belong to an as-yet undiscovered species.