The author's personal account of the many facets of daily life at Goldman Sachs gives his memoir the power of persuasion and...
The controversial former head of Goldman Sachs’ United States equity derivatives business for Goldman Sachs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa chronicles his work for, and departure from, the Wall Street financial giant.
“If I achieve one thing with this book,” writes Smith, “I hope it will be to empower some people with enough understanding” to call their congressional representatives and ask for a modern version of the Pecora Commission, which investigated Wall Street after the 1929 crash and proposed durable reforms. The author became a figure of controversy when, on March 15, 2012, the New York Times published his resignation letter, in which he called the current atmosphere at the company “as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.” Indeed, controversy, criticism and questions about his motivation and ability continue to swirl around his book. Smith chronicles his career, which began when he applied for Goldman's intern program when at Stanford University. He explains how the search for revenues from fees came to overshadow the growth of clients' assets, as dog-eat-dog competitiveness spread among the employees at all levels. In the author's view, the transformation took place gradually over the 12 years he worked for the company. Goldman became bound up with changing views of employees' function in financial transactions and the hunt for “elephant trades,” in which “Goldman made $1 million or more in discretionary profit.” Smith links this process effectively to the boom-bust bubble cycle, which characterized the financial world during those years.
The author's personal account of the many facets of daily life at Goldman Sachs gives his memoir the power of persuasion and conviction.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2747-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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