This book surprised me. I read and enjoyed Lewis' Moneyball a while back, and thought I was getting another journalistic account, this time of a crazy moment in corporate culture. Instead, it's very much a memoir of that world. And I didn't care for it at first, since the group of people he writes about are so spectacularly awful. He brings a certain world of investment banking trainees home to you, and I wanted nothing to do with it. If that was the whole book, I don't think I could take it. Something like the way some people don't like The Office (esp. the BBC version); it's too painful to see such human lowness.

But I'm glad I stuck around, because he can really tell a story. The sense of battle, politicking, and putting up fronts. Wry observations. Big picture, little picture. He comes off as a whistle blower with no sense that he's betraying his world; just an inside man dissecting a world he finds amusing, deranged, and perversely fun.