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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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