American Sucker
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A candid memoir of money, desire, and greed, from the author of Great Books.
David Denby was a happy and content man living in New York City with a good job, a wife and two sons, and an Upper West Side apartment. But in 2000, he 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.
As Denby explores his own motives, actions, and illusions, he reveals the underbelly of the irrationally exuberant beast that clutched the throat and brains of most Americans during the late 1990s and early 2000s. American Sucker is a wise, bitter, humorous, and candid memoir that documents one man's confrontation with midlife changes, money, illusions, and shifting values.
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.
