While revealing occurrences inside Bear Stearns that might have contributed to the larger financial meltdown, Greenberg...
The latest entry in the why-Wall-Street-collapsed genre.
Currently the vice chairman emeritus of JP Morgan Chase, “Ace” Greenberg (Memos from the Chairman, 1996) served for years as CEO and chairman of Bear Stearns, the venerable investment bank that was sold to Chase two years ago. Collaborating with New Yorker staff writer Singer (Character Studies: Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed, 2005, etc.), Greenberg, now in his early 80s, includes some self-deprecation along with hubris. The dominant aspect of the narrative, however, is his dismay with Jimmy Cayne, recognized by the public as the driving force at Bear Stearns leading up to the collapse. The author describes Cayne as mean, self-centered and untruthful, and portrays himself as invariably kind to and respectful of Bear Stearns employees (about 15,000 at its apex). Throughout the book, Greenberg peppers lessons from his father, who owned clothing stores in Oklahoma. Many of the lessons detail the appropriate treatment of employees and customers, and the author writes that he adapted the retail-clothing wisdom to investment banking. Oddly, he ends the book with a non-contextual quotation from his father—“I’ll give you three pieces of advice—never make fun of a millionaire, never hit a cripple, and never have sex with an idiot”—adding, “To the best of my knowledge, I’ve remembered all three.” Extraordinarily wealthy during the firm’s golden decades, Greenberg apparently earned the riches by ruling out major risk-taking in favor of moderate risk-taking, and he surrendered primary responsibility for the company’s operations about seven years before the demise. He suggests that if Cayne had paid more attention to business in general and to Greenberg’s moderate advice in particular, Bear Stearns might have survived.
While revealing occurrences inside Bear Stearns that might have contributed to the larger financial meltdown, Greenberg provides few fresh insights about the diseased atmosphere on Wall Street.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6288-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
