From a New York Times book review by Jonathan Dee headlined “A Writer Scrutinizes Privilege, Starting With His Own”:

In the preface to his 11th book, the novelist and journalist Nick McDonell makes a very contemporary gesture of transparency by telling us how much he was paid to write it. In return, he pledges an “interrogation” of America’s most entrenched elite, the entitled, blue-blooded, white upper class of the East Coast, a class of which McDonell himself, by birth and upbringing, is firmly, if ambivalently, a member.