I did not like this book. It frequently made me wonder what the author was trying to argue. The first 60 pages form a reasonably informed overview of what political corruption is, how it shades into legitimate politics in various shades of grey, and why it can be so hard to combat. I can't say I learned anything I didn't already know, but at least it's a concise summary of a multifaceted problem. But I struggled to make sense of the rest of the book. The author does not seem to have experienced even the smallest heureka-moment when laying out his plan for this book. Everything he writes seems more or less obvious and predictable. He focuses on bureaucratic attempts to curb corruption in the year 2000 or so. This description is so tied to that timeframe that much of what he writes is no doubt already outdated.

China is his example of a high-corruption country, but he discusses it merely through various official reforms and anti-corruption programs, which have probably been presented in party gazettes in the same words. He clearly doesn't possess any inside knowledge on Chinese corruption which would take the reader behind the bureaucratic facade. The chapter on the United Kingdom, an example of a low-corruption country, suffers from the opposite problem. The author dives into specific corruption cases and persons in too much detail. He fails to say anything interesting about how the United Kingdom became a low-corruption country, even though he gives a vapid, quasi-historical attempt at explanation.

In the chapter on international finance the author again does not manage anything more than a description of current attempts to curtail illicit international money transfers and stashes. Much of what he writes is badly outdated, so many good newspapers will probably have recent articles on corruption which give you a better overview of the present situation. The chapter on organized crime seems a bit out of place in a book on political corruption. For no discernible reason, the author decides to portray the careers of two druglords, Khun Sa and Pablo Escobar, in some detail. The rest of the chapter just lists various forms of organized crime and discusses them briefly. Again, all of this should be quite familiar to any person who reads newspapers regularly.

The conclusions from this mess are not very impressive. For no discernible reason, the author suddenly diverts his concluding chapter into a discussion of corruption in Hong Kong. At this point I could only slap my head in anger. Why Hong Kong? What is he thinking? My own conclusions concerning this book are not impressive either, because it's hard to say anything comprehensive about such a fragmentary and badly planned book which does not go any deeper into its subject than the average newspaper. You should, of course, not read it.