A Wall Street trader exercises a rich man’s prerogative and offers financial advice and his life story. “See how much money I made!” is the message. “I’m pretty smart and damned tough, too.” To be sure, Schwartz (“Buzzy” to his pals) is the prototypical hard driver, a truly successful day trader, buying and selling in lightning strokes for his own account. His is a talent for exquisite market timing, a tricky game for even the most proficient professionals. His specialty is S&P futures, a technique using the marvel of leverage to greatly multiply the chances for gain—or loss—on each tick. It requires an inordinate amount of research as well as stamina, acumen, and nerve, but it can be worth millions every year. The alternative, as Buzzy frets, is “going tapioca.” Buzzy dearly wanted his kids to say, “ ‘My daddy’s the Champion Trader!’ That was all I cared about,” he admits. With success came Lutäce lunches, expensive artworks, Armani suits, Bally alligator shoes, and other trophies. Schwartz essays a little false humility, but the book’s evasive charm is based on chutzpah. In an effort to leverage with OPM (other people’s money), the author established his own hedge funds until investors (the bastards) pestered him about their money. Don’t be surprised to learn the result was heart disease. Now in Florida, trading again for himself, the quondam Champion Trader reveals, with some repetition, his story. It moves nicely, though, with a certain egomaniacal verve. An appendix gives the author’s daily schedule (e.g, “7:20-7:30 Clean out the plumbing”). His investment methodology is also appended, but only the most devoted professional will utilize this rigorous lesson. An archetypal text, true to life on the Street, destined to be discussed over drinks at trader hangouts after the market closes—and better than going tapioca. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-88-730876-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
One of the great pitchers in baseball history (and one of the most outspoken and disagreeable), Gibson recalls his storied career with the capable help of Wheeler (I Had a Hammer, not reviewed) and shows he's not done being ``difficult.'' A ferocious competitor who made his living pitching high and tight, Gibson had a reputation throughout his 17 years with the St. Louis Cardinals for being just as uncompromising and angry off the field, especially concerning racial matters. Gibson was raised in an Omaha, Nebr., housing project, where his older brother was hero, mentor, and coach. After college, Gibson, who claims that he was better at basketball than baseball, signed a contract with both the Cardinals and the Harlem Globetrotters, playing one year for the latter. He calls his first professional baseball manager, Johnny Keane, ``the closest thing to a saint that I came across in baseball.'' When Keane replaced Solly Hemus (whom Gibson despised) in 1961, it turned the Cardinals', and Gibson's, fortunes around. Known for his extraordinary performances in the postseason, Gibson had a World Series record of 7-2, with a 1.89 ERA and an incredible 92 strikeouts over 81 innings. He won 20 games in five different seasons and in 1968 posted a 1.12 ERA in 305 innings. Gibson offers some fun and insightful recollections of big games, friends, and teammates such as Tim McCarver, Joe Torre, and Bob Uecker, and legendary matchups with Juan Marichal (``the best pitcher of my generation''), Sandy Koufax, and Don Drysdale. Despite his Hall of Fame credentials, Gibson claims he's been ostracized from the game and hasn't held a baseball job since 1984. Though he grouses a lot about being slighted by major league baseball and rehashes all-too-familiar racial difficulties, it is refreshing to get the fiery Gibson's take on the grand old game. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 75,000; $75,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-84794-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
The melodramatic true story of a mythic grand horizontal, told with clarity and understanding.
Versatile biographer Shipman (To the Heart of the Nile, 2004, etc.) explores the life of an ineffectual undercover agent who was considerably more adept under the bedcovers.
Born in Holland in 1876, Margaretha Zelle had a teenaged escapade with her schoolmaster that made it urgently necessary to escape home and her disagreeable family. Answering an advertisement, the girl who was to be Mata Hari wed extravagantly mustachioed Captain MacLeod, stationed in the fetid Dutch East Indies. Her squalid colonial life led to motherhood and divorce; she resurfaced (without her daughter) in 1903 in Paris, where she resorted to prostitution to pay the bills until she began to make a sensation as Mata Hari, an exotic, erotic, scantily clad dancer. “[People] like to see much of a pretty woman,” she remarked. “I have never been afraid to catch a cold.” As the Great War raged, she received favors and gifts, including cash, from battalions of lovers; she was especially partial to officers of various armies. The British suspected her of being a German agent—more because she was wealthy and sexually independent, Shipman suggests, than because of anything she’d done. Given these suspicions, however, it was odd that a French intelligence officer would recruit her as a mole in the summer of 1916. Undeniably clever, Mata Hari was a dreadfully inept spy, soon branded as a double agent. Though a German lover may have rewarded her for services rendered, the author argues, Germany did not pay her to spy. But the war was going badly for France in the winter of 1916-7, and it was convenient to blame traitors. A kangaroo court condemned Mata Hari based on documents that were probably altered by her French intelligence contact, who may have been a German spy himself. The vain, formidable woman whose casual way with the truth played a role in her undoing was shot on October 15, 1917.
The melodramatic true story of a mythic grand horizontal, told with clarity and understanding.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-081728-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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