Product Description

In 2000, the bottom dropped out of David Denby's life when his wife announced she was leaving him. To make matters worse, it looked like he might lose their beloved apartment in the split. Determined to hold onto his home and seized by the 'irrational exuberance' of the stock market, Denby joined the investment frenzy with a particular goal:to make $1 million in one year so he could buy out his wife's share of their home. Denby gathered courage from stock analysts, from the siren song of CNBC, and from tech gurus and lying CEOs at investment conferences. He befriended tech stars like ImClone founder Sam Waksal and Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodgett, both now disgraced in scandals. He plunged into a season of mania, swept forward on the currents of greed, hucksterism, and native American optimism that caught up so many in that era-with cataclysmic results. AMERICAN SUCKER is his account of those years of madness and then of recovered sanity, written with the rueful insight and bitter humor that only a wiser man could attain. What began as a money chase developed into an encounter with such eternal issues as envy, time, love, and death. With wit, warmth, and tough-minded candor, Denby explores not only his own motives and illusions, but the whole panoply of desire, greed, and willful blindness that consumed the nation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #834365 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From 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.
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From AudioFile
What happens when a middle-aged journalist not only invests heavily in the stock market but goes through a divorce and numerous rebounds as well? He writes American Sucker, a funny, sometimes touching exposé of his own foibles and misunderstandings of market lore and himself--before and after the dot-com bubble burst. Be prepared for a long listen, ably voiced by Dennis Boutsikaris, who is well cast as the voice of the disgruntled author. Denby's ramblings are bolstered by real-life anecdotes of brushes with the now incarcerated Sam Wachsal and his ilk. A bonfire of the vanities for the ears. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
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." Donna Seaman
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