"What is tomorrow's Wall Street Journal worth to you today?" Taylor wrote about his 2006 book in promotional materials. "Where is the line between reality and fiction? Are the financial markets really predictable? Does an ancient artifact hold the key to how some of the world's wealthiest families made their fortunes?"
The book was published the same year his son-in-law Perry Greene, the congresswoman's husband, acquired full control of the construction company Taylor founded around 1970, and presents Taylor's theory that stock market dynamics can be predicted by "gravitational fluctuations."
"The back of his book goes into great scientific detail with supportive data," wrote reviewer Bill McDonald, of the Military Writers Society of America. "What you really have is a great action thriller novel for 80 percent of this book followed by an equally interesting non-fiction appendage at the end of the book with Taylor's economic theories. It is a combination that causes one to lose track of what is fiction and what is real in the story."
McDonald compared the novel to Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, but Taylor's own description of the theory's reliance on intricate dials, gauges, crystals and carvings sound like something out of Charles Portis' hilarious Masters of Atlantis.
"[Paradigm] is a unique and masterful blend of intelligent scientific suspense and bold historical mystery stretching from earliest antiquity to the present day-and beyond," Taylor wrote about the novel himself. "His intriguing plot and cast of memorable characters makes for a suspenseful pager-turn that will keep readers guessing about where the lines of reality and fiction merge."
Taylor was so impressed with his eponymous theory that he claimed it had been nominated for the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics, which a Nobel spokesperson was unable to confirm to Politico.
"Information about nominations is not to be disclosed, publicly or privately, for a period of 50 years," the spokesman said.
Amazon reviewers were not quite as effusive in their praise as McDonald or Taylor, who one reader complained went silent when challenged on his theory.
"I would invite anyone to compare historical tidal data in the locations outlined with the conclusions presented in the book - they do not match," wrote reviewer EMT in a 2011 one-star review. "When I confronted the author with this fact, the reply was that he was too busy to look into my query - but he was pretty available when it came to recommend buying his book in the first place. This to me suggests intellectual fraud, in the sense that the results are clearly not what the book purports them to be, and no willingness by the author in addressing them."
Other readers complained about the plot and characters, and felt Taylor's theory intruded too heavily.
"If not for a plot based on 2 dimensional yuppies straight out of the 80's, on whom a page-turner can sometimes sneak by, then definitely it's a plot entirely dependent on the unbelievably persistent wrong choices of the dumbest smart people you could invent," wrote pb in a 2018 one-star review.
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