Since the release of Citizen Kane, factual or fictional, everything in America that concerns the rise and fall of great men has been vulnerable to comparison. Not to dismiss the subtle and widespread impact of that film, but it made only one certain contribution to DC Smith’s upcoming novel. In the scene where Charles’ guardian informs him that his paper looses a million dollars a year, Charles responds that at that rate, he can only afford to run it for twenty more years. In a modern context, the sheer simplicity of the concept illustrated in this scene can be mind-boggling, especially to those for whom it is most relevant. How much is enough? In Bird Out of Hand, Morgan Bird decides that the world’s largest fortune and a media empire is too much, more than he can prove himself worthy of by sustaining the family business and amassing further wealth, so he develops a plan to expend the vast resources and influence of the Bird dynasty in a way that justifies nearly two centuries that his forefathers spent creating it. For the sakes of parallelism and character insight, the narrative is non-linear reaching back as far as the Civil War and extending about two decades into the future. By telling the story mostly through popular media formats and the unfinished memoir of a principle character, the novel blurs the distinction between narrator and reader, providing only the sort of information about its characters that would be readily available to the general public.