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 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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