January 1, 2004
When New Yorker film critic Denby begins his memoir, the year is 1999 and his marriage had just ended. "Having lost the greatest thing in my life," he says, "I feared I would lose another and another." So Denby sets out to ride the NASDAQ bull. What follows is his account of making and losing over $900,000 as the NASDAQ crests and collapses. All the while, Denby carries on a running meditation on greed. He recalls a time when investment was "part of pop culture" and even the guys selling papers had stock tips to pass on. Boutsikaris, the Obie-winning actor who reads the memoir, offers a tour de force performance. He understands irony, managing, in the space of a few moments, to sound self-indulgent, self-deprecating, stunningly sincere and painfully intellectual. At times, the author gets caught up in discussing the history of other booms and the nature of capitalism, but the energy level of Boutsikaris's reading never flags. He captures the author's sense of wonder and betrayal and Denby's final realization that, despite maladies aplenty, the economy remains resilient, as does he.
September 15, 2003
Desperate to buy his departed wife's share of their home, movie critic Denby invests in the stock market-and loses big.
Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from December 1, 2003
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."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)
November 24, 2003
"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. (Jan.)
Forecast:
A print advertising campaign; print, radio and TV interviews; and a five-city author tour will target mid-lifers who will relate to Denby's experiences of anxiety and encroaching age.
January 1, 2004
Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker and author of the best-selling memoir Great Books, has written an aptly titled cautionary tale about playing the stock markets and losing big time. Facing financial difficulties in 2000, he focused his energies on investing with the aim of making a "million dollars." To that end, he obsessively watched CNBC, became conversant with the day-to-day workings of the markets, followed up on investing tips, amassed a portfolio of mostly speculative tech stocks, and hobnobbed with the likes of Sam Waksal and Henry Blodget. He had become (in his words) "the momentum investor who loads up on a hot market sector." Then the inevitable happened: the bubble popped and his investments tanked. While the author's credentials as a film critic are impressive, his personal narrative rationalizing his kamikaze-like investing behavior is neither terribly original nor sympathetic, as the story has been told many times before and with more success. Denby comes across as just another unlucky, disillusioned investor who is poorer but wiser at the end of his tale. Not recommended; for a much more satisfying explanation of how the stock market bubble collapsed in 2000, look to John Cassidy, another New Yorker writer, who provides the best analysis in his exemplary Dot.con. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/03.]-Richard Drezen, "Washington Post," New York City Bureau
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