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Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (W.W. Norton, 1989) Reissued in paperback by Penguin in 1990. Anyone with an interest in working on Wall Street, reporting on Wall Street, or exploring humanity's most capitalistic tendencies at their basest needs to read this book. While both the industry and the economy of the 1980s have long been retired to case-study fodder for the nation's M.B.A. programs, several elements of Lewis' memoir still persist in fueling the corporate culture of global finance today. This book is not about number crunching and financial techno-babble; it is a witty documentary of the personalities that gravitate toward a livelihood bent exclusively on monetary gain, and how they deal with being the discoverers of The Next Big Thing in an industry renowned for its type-A competitiveness. If one can accept that money makes the world go 'round, then Liar's Poker offers a necessary glimpse into the mentalities at the helm of such a world, and the games they must play in order to succeed in it. The title is taken from one such game – a game which schoolchildren may better recognize as, "I doubt it" (among other more colorful names). At Salomon Brothers investment bank, instead of children spending their recess wagering pocket change on the contents of playing cards, grown men spend their coffee break wagering two-comma sums on the contents of a dollar bill's serial number. But Liar's Poker is more than just an account of Gordon Gekko-era greed; Lewis also includes social commentary in the book by self-deprecatingly describing his own unlikely path into the profession. Peppered throughout the narrative are user-friendly explanations of the mechanics behind the major events of the decade that shaped how corporate America would go about its business for many years to come. And while this book focuses more on the facts than the figures of the time, Lewis manages to parse the relevant numbers worth crunching in terms understandable to the outsider, and clarifies how these data made possible such a drastic transformation in not just the industry, but in the economy as well. In recent years, the literary world has been exposed to Lewis' incisiveness in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Slate, as well as books covering the 1996 presidential campaign, the future of the Internet, Netscape founder Jim Clark, and the unorthodoxy of the Oakland A's baseball team. Liar's Poker showcases the roots of his incisiveness, with one big difference: unlike the rest of the themes he has written about since this initial work, Lewis actually lived this story. "Lewis takes the reader through his schoolboy's progress as trainee and geek in the trading room, to high-powered swashbuckler," the National Review observed. "The author has a puckish appreciation for the comic. Yet he also has the knack of explaining precisely how complex deals really work. He provides the most readable explanation I've seen anywhere of the origin within Salomon Brothers of the mortgage-backed securities market .... It is good history, and a good story." MORE: Michael Lewis’ homepage |
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