A must-read for the business crowd.
Nicely crafted debut recounting JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s climb to the pinnacle of American finance.
Now 53, Dimon became Wall Street’s “banker of choice” in 2008 when he executed the historic deal that saved the investment bank Bear Stearns and helped the U.S. government prevent widespread financial calamity. In this admiring biography, New York contributing editor McDonald describes a precocious stockbroker’s son who grew up on Park Avenue and vowed at age nine that he would make a fortune one day. Serious, headstrong and outspoken, Dimon earned a Harvard MBA and joined Wall Street legend Sandy Weill at American Express in 1982, becoming the older man’s protégé. Together they spent 15 years making a fortune. Weill hunted out financial firms worth acquiring, and Dimon closed the deals, becoming president of Primerica at age 35. Along the way Dimon developed his signature, regularly updated lists of “Things I Owe People” and “Things People Owe Me” and his credo that “it’s more important to do 10 things and get eight of them right than to do five and get them all right.” Their colossal egos finally clashing, Weill and Dimon fell out in the late ’90s, with Dimon resigning to head Bank One and then the global megabank JPMorgan Chase, which he tranformed into a high-performing firm with his trademark cost-cutting and integration of systems. McDonald shows how Dimon came out from under Weill’s shadow, exercising a penchant for openness and debate-driven decision-making and a commitment to the belief that CEOs should “drill down” (he demanded 50-page books with monthly numbers from each division head). With a new maturity that allowed him to avoid the subprime meltdown, Dimon eventually eclipsed his mentor/competitor Weill, winning recognition as a Wall Street hero for rescuing Bear Stearns and, writes the author, “a leader who knew how to make a company grow.” McDonald produces a seamless narrative of the complex deals and power struggles that characterized Dimon’s career throughout this heady period.
A must-read for the business crowd.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9953-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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