without Yeung Wai Hong and Kate Xiao Zhou, and much less pleasurable without Jim Whitaker and my fellow members of the cobra-blood-drinking fraternity: Jerry Taylor, Gary Dempsey, and Aaron Lukas. I want to thank my publisher and friend Morgan Entrekin and everyone at Grove/Atlantic for printing this book (probably against their better judgment) and paying me for it (definitely against their better judgment). I want to thank Grove/Atlantic’s Associate Publisher Eric Price, Director of Publicity and Marketing Judy Hottensen, Managing Editor Michael Hornburg, Assistant Editor Amy Hundley, Subsidiary Rights Manager Lauren Wein, and all the other people whom authors do not customarily thank and without whom authors would have nothing but wiggles on a computer screen to show for their efforts. My gratitude to Scott Manning for arranging the book tour and putting up with my ingratitude while I’m out touring and am temporarily under the impression that fifty-year-old writers should act like twenty-year-old rock-band drummers. More gratitude to my longtime and long-suffering agent, Bob Dattila, who barely winced when I proposed a book on economics (“Oh, Hollywood is going to leap on that”). And more gratitude yet to Jacqui Graham, who keeps publishing me in Britain despite my continued outbursts of provincial Anglophobia, and to Don Epstein and everyone at Greater Talent Network, who keep finding people who will pay me for lecturing so that I don’t have to get a real job or write books that can be made into movies. With all these thanks said, I now come to one of the great conundrums of literature. How does one give full and sufficient credit to one’s wife without sounding like a mealymouthed pig or giving the readers mental images of the tambourine-playing spouse in This Is Spinal Tap ? I’m going to go for mealymouthed pig. Tina O’Rourke has a business degree and understands the stuff in this book, which is more than its author does. She accompanied me on several of the foreign trips, or, I should say, I accompanied her. She helped with the travel arrangements and tour research. To her I owe the slogan “America—it doesn’t suck.” And Tina, supplied with Rolling Stone journalist credentials for the Cuba trip, was forced at one point to actually ask a pop-music star, “What’s your favorite color?” Then, as this book was being written, Tina edited, fact- checked, proofread, entered the whole manuscript into the word processor that remains a Delphic mystery to her husband, managed the household, changed diapers, and gave our infant daughter her 1 A . M ., 3 A . M ., 3:30 A . M ., 3:45 A . M ., 4
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