A captivating if necessarily fragmented look at an American institution. (50 b&w illustrations)
Essays, excerpts, snippets, and snapshots of the Street, from 1670 to 2000.
Colbert presents the third of his “eyewitness” volumes (Eyewitness to the American West, 1998, etc.), and again offers a large chorus of voices (more than 80) singing about Wall Street with useful commentary by the editor. The performers range from Andrew Jackson (closing the Second Bank of the United States) to Andrew Carnegie (lining up investors for a bridge) to Charlie Chaplin (selling Liberty Bonds) to Christopher Buckley and Art Buchwald (waxing wise on investment vagaries) to Louis Rukeyser (providing the last words: “It’s just your money, not your life”). So many are the soloists that Colbert sometimes loses track of who’s sung what, so a cute quotation from H.G. Wells appears thrice. And readers may wonder why two personal essays by a journalist-cum-online-trader get nine pages, while the Crash of 1929 gets only four. Still, there is as much fascination as information here. A 1670 visitor noted Wall Street’s prominent gallows and whipping post—items perhaps once again needed, to judge from the accounts of the dark doings of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky (few of the excerpts here are creepier than the transcript of Boesky’s 1990 testimony). An observer of Street-types during the Panic of 1857 noted a still-familiar sight in times of stock-stress: “People's faces in Wall Street look fearfully gaunt and desperate.” More amusing is a little piece by Harpo (not Karl) Marx about accepting investment tips from an elevator operator, and there is an especially eerie news item concerning the bombing of Morgan Bank on September 16, 1920: the bomber left a horse-drawn cart filled with explosives in front of the bank. And in his introduction of pioneer Muriel Siebert, Colbert cracks, “Wall Street was never an exclusive men’s club; it was a locker room.”
A captivating if necessarily fragmented look at an American institution. (50 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: May 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-7679-0660-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
An ex-hippie falls into a gap between the personal and the political in this grimly fascinating yet fatally flawed debut. Odzer, a graduate student in anthropology, was onto something when she came up with the idea of chronicling the lives of women working in Bangkok's red-light district. Their strange naãvetÇ set against a background of bars showing live sex acts (and some, like a ``blow job bar'' that Odzer visits, openly offering paid sexual services) is an intriguing subject. Odzer proves herself a good interviewer and a thorough researcher. Her trips to the poor northern Thailand homes of some of her subjects are heartbreaking: With their ``fine'' clothes and liberated attitudes, the sex workers are seen as glamorous heroes. (Odzer quotes an anecdote about a schoolgirl who praised a teacher with the unlikely compliment, ``You look as pretty as a whore today.'') Odzer's examination of the confluence of money and sex is shrewd, but when she herself becomes involved with a tout (pimp) named Jek, her analytical abilities fly out the window. It's hard to keep a straight face while she coos over receiving a ``McDonald's french fry keyring'' as a gift from her paramour and then becomes disillusioned when he gives an identical one to an acquaintance. And when, immediately after they have engaged in unprotected sex, she is shocked to learn that Jek sometimes sleeps with prostitutes, it is hard to know whether to be horrified or stupefied by her. Clear-eyed about the farang (foreign) men who avail themselves of Bangkok's sex trade and the strange relationships they often develop, mistaking bought sex for love, Odzer is blind to the similar, mutual exploitation in her own relationship. Odzer seems to want sisterhood to be powerful—but what she really aspires to are the privileges of farang men. (40 b&w photos, not seen; 1 map, 7 diagrams) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-281-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
A tedious case study of what can happen before, during, and after the shift of a desirable advertising account from one agency to another. In an effort to revive the company's flagging car sales, Subaru of America (SOA) put its sizable (albeit modest by auto- industry standards) account up for grabs during 1991. Drawing on the access granted him by SOA, Rothenberg (The Neoliberals, 1984) offers an exhaustive and ultimately exhausting rundown on a commercial mating dance. He also lards his fly-on-the-wall reportage with digressive takes on the history of big-league advertising and its dominant players. To some extent, these asides provide context for the author's evaluation of the work done by the survivor of SOA's screening process—Wieden & Kennedy, a so-called postmodernist shop based in Portland, Oreg., which made a name for itself as Nike's ad agency. Like many partnerships, the SOA/W&K alliance proved short-lived, contentious, and mutually frustrating. The association ended not with a bang but a whimper shortly after the agency's spots (duly approved by a Subaru management team that had been revamped in the interim) finished dead last in a USA Today survey of viewer reactions to commercials broadcast during the 1993 Super Bowl telecast. In reporting countless instances of high- stakes conflict and steering the episodic narrative up innumerable blind alleys, however, Rothenberg (who borrowed the book's title from an A.J. Liebling pensÇe on fortune) frequently loses track of his story. He doesn't even get around to detailing the background of SOA's Japanese owner (Fuji Heavy Industries) until near the end. As it happens, the parent organization's engineering-versus-styling bias informed many of the clashes over image that marked promotional debates at SOA during the early 1990s. Despite a few fine set pieces, this is an overlong, essentially pointless anecdote in which unsympathetic hucksters are pitted against one another—and the consuming public.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41227-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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