Anansi's Gold is about a scam artist who garnered inexplicable loyalty from people despite blatantly bilking them out of their money, who boasted of his University of Pennsylvania education while cheating repeatedly and unrepentantly on his wives, who moves in circles with Roy Cohn while living up to the '80s "Greed is Good" mantra and forever wriggling free of the consequences of his actions— oh, no, not Donald Trump!

This is about John Ackah Blay-Miezah, a Ghanaian con artist who fooled various kinds of greedy and gullible people out of millions in the 70s and 80s. To some Blay-Miezah promised a Pan-Africanist vision of post-colonial investment in Ghana, with the returns from the "investment fund" under his management used to build roads, schools, and health clinics; to others, he confirmed all their racist stereotypes about Africa and let them think of themselves as the ones suckering him. Shockingly, the only person who came out ahead was Blay-Miezah.

The marketing has kind of positioned this as a true crime story, but it's actually much more a sober historical account of post-independence Ghana, and how its people suffered from the consequences of colonialism and the brutality of first a military dictatorship and then the Rawlings regime. Yepoka Yeebo does a great job in pulling together so many disparate strands of a fraud scheme that ranged across continents, but I did think it could have been edited down about 50 pages or so without losing anything of the essential argument. ( )

Yepoka Yeebo's Anansi's Gold is fascinating, thrilling, and well-told. It is as entertaining as it is informative.

I enjoy stories about fraudsters and swindlers. I had read news articles or passing information about the case of Ghana's "missing" gold, but I knew little about it. In summary, John Blay-Miezah was a bright Ghanaian who studied overseas and bounced around a bit before he came up with a wild scam: upon his death President Nkrumah had put Blay-Miezah in charge of trust fund worth billions of dollars. Blay-Miezah worked his way through London, Philadelphia, Conkary, Geneva, New York, Accra, and Seoul getting people to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to help him get the trust fund released. Along the way, Blay-Miezah works must peddle around coups, expulsions, and diplomatic entanglements.

Most of Yeebo's research seems to have been good, gumshoe detective work. She did the hard work of getting first-hand interviews and pulling out wonderful primary sources.

Although she picked a wonderful subject, Yeebo's storytelling is brilliant. She gets through some difficult historical truths while keeping the narrative rolling. The book is fun and easy to read. It is a book that will be enjoyed by laypeople like me, aspiring journalists, historians, and any reader looking for a great, well-told story. ( )

*a very well-written novel about John Ackah Blay - Miezah and Ghana's missing wealth
*easy to read
*well researched
*very interesting storyline from cover to cover and a part of history I was not aware of
*excellent first novel by Yepoka Yeebo
*highly recommend ( )