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Hardcover
266 pages
ISBN 9780393072235 Published March 2010
W. W. Norton & Company
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Posted July 15, 2010 10:51 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Keith Gessen is the founder of n+1, a mostly literary magazine out of New York City, and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, which, as you can probably gather from the title, is also thoroughly literary. So, how is it that he has now penned one of the most fascinating books to date on the recent calamity on Wall Street?
It began as concern for a friend who had borrowed against his home in a time of financial trouble. To figure out how deflating home prices were going to affect this friend, he did an interview for n+1 with an anonymous hedge fund manager he calls HFM. That interview turned into a series of interviews spanning two years, “from the first rumblings of the crisis in the fall of 2007 to the late summer of 2009....” The timing was serendipitous.
As the subprime crisis quickly spirals into a wide array of other crises, you’re given an intimate account of it all through the lens of someone watching from the twentieth floor. It is by turns tragic, introspective and wildly funny. It is always very intelligent and, above all, touchingly human. At the end of Chapter 2, “The Death of Bear,” we find HFM reacting to the quickly worsening situation with a bit of gallows humor.
n+1: So you look out here onto midtown on the twentieth floor. This is all going to be okay?
HFM: That guy there will lose his job. White shirt, futzing about—he’ll lose his job. He’s putting. There’s going to be no room for people like that, the bar is higher. You can’t play golf in your office during a crisis.
[…]
That guy’s done! Everyone else is okay.
There are books on the crisis whose breadth is seemingly larger—Too Big To Fail, The Big Short, The End of Wall Street. The story lines in those books are sweeping, the personalities larger than life. This book’s wealth is in its details, the book’s character anonymous but close and personable. When reading Diary of a Very Bad Year, the details gather into a more intimate experience of that wider picture and its sobering implications.
Jack Covert Selects - The Big Short
Posted April 8, 2010 10:23 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Michael Lewis has crafted an impressive collection of non-fiction that represents the very best of the genre: Liars’ Poker, Moneyball and now The Big Short. With this new book, Lewis applies his keen investigative instinct and careful re-creation of characters to the cause of documenting the continuing nightmare that is our current economic predicament.
After reading several books on this subject, I have found that the very hardest thing for writers to accomplish is making the technical aspects—which are crucial for a complete understanding of the crisis—digestible. My eyes tend to gloss over the requisite pages of almost incomprehensible financial jargon, and the books tend to lack a distinctive quality to set them apart. After all, what more can be said about ARMs and CDOs?
But, while Lewis does spend time explaining that history and the inner workings of the markets (even going back to his days in the belly of the beast chronicled in Liars’ Poker), he introduces us to real, three-dimensional characters who are living in this world and we easily learn the more arcane aspects of the story as we read and get enmeshed in their lives.
It is the story of people like Jamie Mai and Charlie Ledley of Cornwell Capital Management:
Jamie Mai was tall and strikingly handsome and so, almost by definition, had the air of a man in charge—until he opened his mouth and betrayed his lack of confidence in everything from tomorrow’s sunrise to the future of the human race.
His partner, Charlie Ledley, “had the pallor of a mortician and the manner of a man bent on putting off, for as long as possible, definite action.”
This attention to the characters in this morality play intensifies our understanding of just what happened to our 401K investments and why there are four houses still for sale on our block after two years and many “reduced price” signs.
Michael Lewis is a writer who entertains us, and in the process educates us about both business and the human spirit.
