A stark exposé of Wall Street’s corrupt underside and an inspiring story of overcoming adversity.
The daughter of Haitian immigrants lands on Wall Street.
Born in the South Bronx and raised in Queens, Fabré styled herself as a brash, street-smart hustler, traits that served her well when she found herself working on Wall Street. In her zesty debut memoir, the author recounts her surprising journey from roach-filled public housing to becoming one of the “youngest Black female stockbrokers.” At the age of 19, she was an ace salesperson for an optical shop when she met a recruiter for VTR Capital, an offshoot of the notorious investment firm portrayed in Wolf of Wall Street. Although she would be working as a cold caller for a low salary, she saw the job as an investment in her future. After three months as a cold caller, she learned, your firm could sponsor you for a test to earn a broker’s license. Fabré had no doubt that she would excel, get sponsored, and pass the challenging test. “Whenever I set out to do something,” she asserts, with no false modesty, “I was confident it would work out for me.” VTR certainly tested her conviction: Like all the Black and Latine cold callers, she was brutally belittled by the White brokers. “All callers were made to feel inferior,” writes the author, “had it hammered into them that they were lowly dialers, good for punching numbers into a phone and uttering words from a script, nothing more. Verbal—and sometimes physical—abuse was hurled at us.” But there was big money to be made, and Fabré admits to wanting “the cars, the houses in the Hamptons, the Gucci and the Versace.” At the age of 20, “without knowing a single thing about investing,” she became a broker. With disarming candor, Fabré recounts her heady infatuation with Wall Street, her timely escape from VTR, and her dawning realization of what she and her colleagues were really doing.
A stark exposé of Wall Street’s corrupt underside and an inspiring story of overcoming adversity.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-81685-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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