While revealing occurrences inside Bear Stearns that might have contributed to the larger financial meltdown, Greenberg...
The latest entry in the why-Wall-Street-collapsed genre.
Currently the vice chairman emeritus of JP Morgan Chase, “Ace” Greenberg (Memos from the Chairman, 1996) served for years as CEO and chairman of Bear Stearns, the venerable investment bank that was sold to Chase two years ago. Collaborating with New Yorker staff writer Singer (Character Studies: Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed, 2005, etc.), Greenberg, now in his early 80s, includes some self-deprecation along with hubris. The dominant aspect of the narrative, however, is his dismay with Jimmy Cayne, recognized by the public as the driving force at Bear Stearns leading up to the collapse. The author describes Cayne as mean, self-centered and untruthful, and portrays himself as invariably kind to and respectful of Bear Stearns employees (about 15,000 at its apex). Throughout the book, Greenberg peppers lessons from his father, who owned clothing stores in Oklahoma. Many of the lessons detail the appropriate treatment of employees and customers, and the author writes that he adapted the retail-clothing wisdom to investment banking. Oddly, he ends the book with a non-contextual quotation from his father—“I’ll give you three pieces of advice—never make fun of a millionaire, never hit a cripple, and never have sex with an idiot”—adding, “To the best of my knowledge, I’ve remembered all three.” Extraordinarily wealthy during the firm’s golden decades, Greenberg apparently earned the riches by ruling out major risk-taking in favor of moderate risk-taking, and he surrendered primary responsibility for the company’s operations about seven years before the demise. He suggests that if Cayne had paid more attention to business in general and to Greenberg’s moderate advice in particular, Bear Stearns might have survived.
While revealing occurrences inside Bear Stearns that might have contributed to the larger financial meltdown, Greenberg provides few fresh insights about the diseased atmosphere on Wall Street.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6288-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
