With a lucid style and a sense of humor and amusement, Lowenstein guides us through the thickets of high finance in the...
An entertaining and informative history of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), the hedge fund whose 1998 collapse rattled the financial markets.
Lowenstein (Buffett, 1995) begins with a portrait of John Meriwether, the man who would be head of LTCM. Chicago-born, trained in mathematics and business at Northwestern and the University of Chicago, Meriwether joined Salomon Brothers in 1974. At 30, he formed the Arbitrage Group there in 1977. The author credits Meriwether with bringing the academic nerd to Wall Street, hiring Eric Rosenfeld, Gregory Hawkins, and Lawrence Hilibrand (all MIT wunderkinder) at precisely the moment that computer research was transforming the bond market. In 1993 Meriwether created LTCM and took his crew to Greenwich, Connecticut—and for four years the fund shone. Staffers and outsiders complained that the partners were condescending and secretive, but the huge profits kept everyone happy. In 1997 Myron Scholes and Paul Merton, LTCM’s star academics, won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Lowenstein excels at explaining esoteric financial topics; he clarifies the nature of hedge funds and coherently describes the general strategies and specific types of trades in arbitrage. With access to the partners’ confidential memoranda, he is also able to document LTCM’s swift fall with exceptional clarity and insight. On August 17, 1998, the fund had capital of $3.6 billion—but in another five weeks it was mostly gone. In a dizzying succession of events, Russia declared a moratorium on its debt, Brazilian and Mexican bonds weakened, and the Asian markets declined. All of LTCM’s trades went bad, to a degree that no one had been prepared for. (Whereas the wizards’ mathematical model calculated that a loss of more than $35 million in one day was unlikely, the fund lost $553 million on August 21, 1998, alone.) The story ends with drama and comedy: the 14-bank bailout group bickered and backstabbed, but it saved the day—and by December 1999 Meriwether and his old crew were back in business with a fresh $250 million and a new name.
With a lucid style and a sense of humor and amusement, Lowenstein guides us through the thickets of high finance in the computer age.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50137-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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