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
IN THE NEWS
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
