A gripping and revelatory behind-the-scenes look at investment banking.
A memoir offers a warts-and-all insider view of the high-stakes investment banking world.
This new book from Keenan chronicles his experiences at Deutsche Bank in Manhattan as an associate after a stint as a professional hockey player. Here readers see him apply for the job, get it, attend the long orientation sessions alongside his many fellow new hires, and begin his work as an investment banker in the cubicles, hallways, and late-night bars of the finance world. “Can you imagine if people knew what corporate finance was really like?” asks a cohort at one point in the account, to which the author replies: “I feel like only a fiction writer could show this world, what really happens here.” Some of his colleagues have on their shelves untouched copies of business classics like Den of Thieves, Liar’s Poker, and Barbarians at the Gate. Although Keenan’s memoir is every bit as informative as those earlier titles, it’s also game and accessible, coming across at all points as the most readable kind of The Firm–style fiction, complete with sharp personalities and lively dialogue. The author dramatizes his time at Deutsche Bank with colorful anecdotes but also grounds things in industry details. When mentioning something called a “football field sheet,” for instance, he footnotes: “A summary output of all valuation methods used. The name is derived from the fact that the output resembles a football field—or at least what bankers think a football field looks like” (adding, in his signature iconoclastic style, “I don’t see it”). His own experiences in the trenches are far less the shark-tank glamour of Wall Street and far more the squalid desperation of Boiler Room, and he’s always ready to offer a sardonic counterpoint. “Was I getting crushed?” he asks early in the story. “I couldn’t even tell. And if you stayed past 3:00 am one night, all that mattered was working it into every conversation you had the next day.” The result is a book that’s informative, hilarious, and dramatic, well deserving of a place on that shelf of Wall Street classics.
A gripping and revelatory behind-the-scenes look at investment banking.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64293-408-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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