Dibs

We were startled to see that billionaire speculator George Soros — affectionately known as “the man who broke the Bank of England” — has apparently adopted a lucrative new career: novelist. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal on Sunday, June 11, “Novelist George Soros, an international financier and philanthropist, and Joan Didion, a writer celebrated in the worlds of journalism, literature and film, will come to Louisville this fall as part of the Kentucky Author Forum…. Soros, 75, addresses the threats of nuclear proliferation, global warming, terrorism and the breakdown of international cooperation in his novel ‘The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror.’” A quick peek at Amazon.com reveals that said book is no novel at all but rather a nonfiction treatise about George W. Bush’s shortcomings. Freaky to think about plot and foreshadowing for a minute there, though! A bit more sleuthing revealed that philanthropist, John Kerry supporter and convicted inside-trader Soros — loved by some but accused by others of being personally responsible for massive financial collapses not only in the UK and Eastern Europe but also Asia — is the son of a famous Esperanto writer, Tivadar Soros. In 1946, teenaged George — one of the world’s few native Esperanto speakers, taught to speak the synthetic, invented “international language” from birth — used his participation in an Esperanto convention outside the Iron Curtain to escape his Soviet-occupied native Hungary. He has written other books such as The Crisis of Global Capitalism, none of which are novels.