Thorp’s in-the-trenches account of gaming the system(s) is a pleasure—and instructive, too.
You can’t time the market, and you can’t beat the house. Right? Wrong.
What makes a good investor? To gauge from this amiable account by math whiz, professor, gambler, hedge fund manager, and investor Thorp (The Mathematics of Gambling, 1984, etc.)—one of the early “quants,” as brokers call number nerds—much hinges on being curious and being willing to do the work necessary to satisfy that curiosity. In his case, there’s also a contrarian streak at play; told, like all of us, that the winning odds are always with the casino and that there’s no way to reliably play against the house, he took the scientific approach and tested the assertion. “I formed the habit of taking the result of pure thought—such as a formula for valuing warrants—and using it profitably,” he writes. And did he ever. Blessed with a bent for understanding complex mathematics and being able to do sums in his head (a lost art, he assures us, that just about anyone can master), he first went to Las Vegas as a kind of validating experiment to confirm the suspicion that a deck of cards “that isn’t well shuffled may have predictable patterns that can be exploited.” Discovering those patterns is the rub, and Thorp’s abilities outshine those of most mortals, which would seem to be true of his power to read a futures contract and a balance sheet. His account of making a broker blanch with a daring hedge maneuver during the height of the October 1987 crash is an exercise in learned derring-do, with the upshot that while the S&P dropped by a quarter, he at least broke even during the worst of it and gained in the long term. It’s the kind of thing any would-be investor, to say nothing of casino cowboy, ought to read.
Thorp’s in-the-trenches account of gaming the system(s) is a pleasure—and instructive, too.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6796-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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