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
Poignant and funny.
A middle-class couple in “car-honking, no-YOU-shut-up Brooklyn” embarks on a three-year mission to seek the permanence of home ownership.
Journalist Williams loved her Carroll Gardens rental, but felt pressured as homeowning friends with appreciating equity ridiculed those who didn’t invest in real estate, asking, “What will it cost six months from now?” With limited savings for a down payment, the author and her husband desperately started looking for houses in Brooklyn, but in their price range found only dilapidated, termite-ridden buildings near highways and unsafe neighborhoods. Williams bitingly describes the search, reliving the hysteria at the height of the 2003–06 real-estate bubble: “Open houses are crowded and competitive, with brokers entertaining multiple suitors like Scarlett O’Hara at a party.” Without much of a plot engine to propel a repetitive, mostly unfulfilling search, the author opts for plumbing the psychological depths of her emotional history, explaining her tenacious need for a house and security in confessional, tell-all prose. Abandoned by her husband when she was six-months pregnant, Williams’ reluctant mother is a chronic worrier and inappropriate confider who says things like, “You have no idea how incredible it is to have grandchildren…It’s so different than what you feel for your own child.” The author shows New York rapidly becoming affordable only for the extremely rich, while the middle-class gets squeezed out to the suburbs. Along the way, she patiently explains such real-estate idioms as staging, no-doc mortgages (“a lending version of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ ”) and interest-only loans. Although the author’s mantra was to go for what you want, no matter how unobtainable it seemed, eventually she compromised and settled for a lower-priced home in Inwood, on the northern tip of Manhattan, close to the Cloisters and a beautiful park.
Poignant and funny.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5708-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor.
Essayist Handler debuts with a memoir of loving sibling bonds cruelly interrupted.
The author’s eight-year-old sister Susie died of leukemia in 1969, when Handler was ten. Their sister Sarah had been ill since infancy with Kostmann’s Syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder like leukemia, but much more rare; she died at age 27 in 1992. Yet Susie and Sarah were at her 1998 wedding, the author avers. They remain vividly present in memory, appearing in the waking reveries and sleeping dreams of their healthy sibling. The girls’ parents were liberal Yankee Jews transplanted to suburban Atlanta in the ’60s. They lived with their children on “a lush street where professors and doctors grew big gardens and tied bandannas around the necks of their Irish setters.” Dad, a crusading labor lawyer, was terrified by his daughters’ illnesses. He went a bit mad, was hospitalized, fled to the Far East and then returned for a divorce. (Perhaps, Handler muses, Dad was angry with her for having a future.) Mom pretended all was well, but the entire family was plunged into darkness by the deaths of two daughters. The author’s stark, lucid prose probes what those losses did to her parents and to her. Handler moved from Atlanta’s Coca-Cola society to the coke culture of Los Angeles. She maintained a journal and kept pertinent ephemera. In 2004-05, she obtained and pored over copious medical files on her sisters’ symptoms, medications and clinical trials. With a sure grasp of revelatory detail, the author recalls homely verities from a vanished life. Her memory piece is an elegy for her dead sisters, who are not quite lost as long as they live in her thoughts.
A heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-648-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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