Book Summary and Reviews of Chain of Title by David Dayen

Chain of Title by David Dayen

Chain of Title

How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud

by David Dayen

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  • Published:
  • May 2016, 320 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

In the depths of the Great Recession, a cancer nurse, a car dealership worker, and an insurance fraud specialist helped uncover the largest consumer crime in American history - a scandal that implicated dozens of major executives on Wall Street.

They called it foreclosure fraud: millions of families were kicked out of their homes based on false evidence by mortgage companies that had no legal right to foreclose.

Lisa Epstein, Michael Redman, and Lynn Szymoniak did not work in government or law enforcement. They had no history of anticorporate activism. Instead they were all foreclosure victims, and while struggling with their shame and isolation they committed a revolutionary act: closely reading their mortgage documents, discovering the deceit behind them, and building a movement to expose it.

Fiscal Times columnist David Dayen recounts how these ordinary Floridians challenged the most powerful institutions in America armed only with the truth - and for a brief moment they brought the corrupt financial industry to its knees.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. An inspiring, well-rendered, deeply reported, and often infuriating account." - Kirkus

"Hitchcockian... Meticulously researched, enthralling, and educational, this addition to the literature of the Great Recession calls out for its own big-screen adaptation." - Publishers Weekly

This information about Chain of Title was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

David Dayen

David Dayen is a contributing writer to Salon and a weekly columnist for the Fiscal Times, and he writes for publications including the New Republic, the American Prospect, The Guardian, Vice, The Intercept, and the the Huffington Post. He lives in Los Angeles. This is his first book.

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