A different view of the financial crisis that raises important questions about business ethics and personal responsibility.
A former Navy fighter pilot and 24-year veteran of the armed forces applies lessons he learned from the Navy to Wall Street.
Assisted by Robinson (co-author: Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, 2007, etc.), Lay asserts that the crash of 2008 wouldn't have happened if the Navy's standards of recruitment, training and commitment to truthfulness operated in the world of business. “No amount of bleating and whining will ever let Wall Street off the hook,” he writes. “They darn near single-handedly screwed up the world. It would not have happened if they’d taken a very strong pull on what was becoming a runaway horse.” Lay examines the reckless pursuit of short-term profit and the proliferation of “evil and obfuscated” financial instruments, but his main focus is different. He worked for a Lehman Brothers subsidiary, Neuberger Berman, shortly before the 2008 crash, and he compares the firm’s former standards under the family ownership of Bobbie Lehman and his predecessors with what it became under Richard Fuld. Lehman Brothers, writes Lay, “had a rich and glittering tradition of building mighty American businesses, enormous operations that had stood the test of time—until personal greed became the only thing that mattered.” The author claims that many Wall Street firms lack any sense of “undying loyalty,” and he contrasts these companies with the Navy, in which “the past remains the custodian of the future, not the other way around.” Lay also discusses the training and education programs provided by the Naval Academy and the difficult qualification process for naval aviators. Shortcuts are simply not tolerated.
A different view of the financial crisis that raises important questions about business ethics and personal responsibility.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59315-717-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Vanguard/Perseus
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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