Reading this book-length swagger, you’d be forgiven for keeping your money under the mattress henceforth. But if LeFevre is...
A scattershot syllabus for billionaire boys-club bankers in Bad Behavior 101. “As we see it,” writes LeFevre, “if you’re dumb enough to get caught cheating, you probably don’t belong on Wall Street.”
Cocaine, bloody marys, more cocaine—and that’s before breakfast. No, it’s not a day at Hunter S. Thompson’s ranch but rather a training day at an ordinary big-ticket investment bank, a place full of starry-eyed Ivy Leaguers and a few Oxbridge types looking to score big. Cheating, to hear the author—famed for his tell-all tweets before this book deal—tell it, is ordinary behavior, hardly worth pausing to ponder except to figure out ways around the traps laid by fellow cadets. LeFevre is the real-world embodiment of Patrick Bateman, coming off as soulless, unapologetic, and full of overweening pride—the very stuff of which successful Wall Street honchos are made. But he is also strangely unreflective. Where readers might want to know a bit about, say, why supposedly heavily regulated institutions are so open to corruption and system-gaming, LeFevre brags about the fact that his “garbage disposal eats better than 99% of the world” and insists that “morality and deviance are relative.” (Yes, readers may be thinking, but if it’s my money at stake, some absolutes are in order.) What we learn instead is that it’s easy to chalk up a $2,700 bar bill in an evening, that drugs are as easy to come by as potato chips in communist China, and that part of the job description at any brokerage worth its salt is “to proactively throw my competitors under the bus at every possible opportunity.”
Reading this book-length swagger, you’d be forgiven for keeping your money under the mattress henceforth. But if LeFevre is truly hell-bound, as his title suggests, then it’s for indifferent writing as much as for any fiscal peccadilloes.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2330-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
