Here's another entry in the list of books about big, bad businesses. In this, the once credulous author takes a wrong turn on Wall Street, lands on a frenetic Merrill Lynch trading floor, and runs into a cabal of wheeler-dealers he calls a Latin Mafia. After a year, there's the inevitable exit interview. It's a story of job dissatisfaction in the extreme. With Harvard and the Navy on his rÇsumÇ, Stiles, of the Free State of Maryland, sought his fortune in the heady world of finance. That meant the capital of capitalism, New York. For him, specifically, it meant Merrill's emerging-markets group dealing in esoteric Third World debt instruments, and he had no notion of what they were. The world of high finance is one of young autodidacts. Rational training is rare; education depends on a skeptical attitude and a little reconnaissance. The reader can learn, along with the author, what a Brady bond is and how leverage on derivatives squeezed Orange County, Calif. Those with little interest in such arcana will nevertheless find entertainment in the cautionary tale of a young man's discovery of the hubris and naked mendacity emblematic of the warriors of Wall Street. Added to the cultural misfit at work, life in the Big Apple (Brooklyn, to be exact) was a disaster for Stiles, his loyal spouse, and his little dog, too. The big bucks didn't go very far and the Stileses were, in a funny set piece, manhandled in small claims court. Ultimately, though, it was a question of morals. Was the possibility of a seven-figure take-home worth all the compromises? In somewhat overwrought terms, the author, like a Boomer Hamlet, wrestled with the question. The answer came easily. He was fired. Stiles's view of the marketplace is fundamentally true, of course. Nicely written latter-day muckraking in a slick and entertaining debut.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8129-2789-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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