A must-read for the business crowd.
Nicely crafted debut recounting JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s climb to the pinnacle of American finance.
Now 53, Dimon became Wall Street’s “banker of choice” in 2008 when he executed the historic deal that saved the investment bank Bear Stearns and helped the U.S. government prevent widespread financial calamity. In this admiring biography, New York contributing editor McDonald describes a precocious stockbroker’s son who grew up on Park Avenue and vowed at age nine that he would make a fortune one day. Serious, headstrong and outspoken, Dimon earned a Harvard MBA and joined Wall Street legend Sandy Weill at American Express in 1982, becoming the older man’s protégé. Together they spent 15 years making a fortune. Weill hunted out financial firms worth acquiring, and Dimon closed the deals, becoming president of Primerica at age 35. Along the way Dimon developed his signature, regularly updated lists of “Things I Owe People” and “Things People Owe Me” and his credo that “it’s more important to do 10 things and get eight of them right than to do five and get them all right.” Their colossal egos finally clashing, Weill and Dimon fell out in the late ’90s, with Dimon resigning to head Bank One and then the global megabank JPMorgan Chase, which he tranformed into a high-performing firm with his trademark cost-cutting and integration of systems. McDonald shows how Dimon came out from under Weill’s shadow, exercising a penchant for openness and debate-driven decision-making and a commitment to the belief that CEOs should “drill down” (he demanded 50-page books with monthly numbers from each division head). With a new maturity that allowed him to avoid the subprime meltdown, Dimon eventually eclipsed his mentor/competitor Weill, winning recognition as a Wall Street hero for rescuing Bear Stearns and, writes the author, “a leader who knew how to make a company grow.” McDonald produces a seamless narrative of the complex deals and power struggles that characterized Dimon’s career throughout this heady period.
A must-read for the business crowd.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9953-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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