From Publishers Weekly
"I wanted to be wealthy," Denby bluntly admits near the end of this absorbing memoir of the dot-com boom and bust. "I didn't make it." Like millions of other amateur investors in 2000 and 2001, Denby (Great Books) was swept along by greed, by the nearly messianic belief that the stock market offered easy opportunities for unlimited prosperity. Denby sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Nasdaq, digested unhealthy amounts of CNBC and the Wall Street Journal and forged friendships with some of the era's brightest stars (and, later, its most public criminals). He lost his balance in the excess of the time-stock tickers in strip clubs; parties at executives' lofts-and then lost his money when the market crashed. ("The ax had swung," Denby writes, "and heads lay all over the ground.") Though exceedingly well written, Denby's portrait of the great "Dot Con" generally echoes the sentiments of other, similarly themed books about the period. The work is more appealing when Denby focuses on himself: he had nearly suffered a nervous breakdown when his wife of 18 years left him, and making enough money to buy out her share of their apartment was his initial motivation for investing in the market. Denby brutally details his decline, from a night of impotence to an affair with a married woman, then a six-month obsession with Internet porn-harrowing stuff for a New Yorker staff writer. His dissection of his own Upper West Side narcissism offers some of the most candid critiques of the Manhattan bourgeoisie ever found outside of a Woody Allen film. More of Denby, and less of the Nasdaq, would have made this good book even better.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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The stock market was booming in 2000, and Denby, film critic for the
New Yorker and author of
Great Books (1996), found himself channeling his anger and grief over his wife's decision to end their 18-year marriage into investing. Convinced that the only way to redeem his shattered life--and hold on to the comfy Manhattan apartment he and his wife, the novelist Cathleen Schine, and their two teenage sons had called home--was to make $1 million, this humanistic critic became utterly obsessed with trading, even using his journalist credentials to get close to the likes of Sam Waksal, founder of ImClone, one of the hot but doomed companies fueling the now infamous high-tech bubble. Denby is always worth reading, but he really tops himself in this riveting apologia. Habitually observant and eloquently analytical, possessed of a deep frame of reference and philosophical turn of mind, Denby turns his chronicle of trading madness into a compelling meditation on greed, time, the "great ends of life," and the baffling phenomenon of mass delusion. "We can be suckered by apparent success," Denby writes, "but the greater fault is to be suckered by failure."
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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