Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose

(Grand Central, $27)

So some young Wall Street hotshots are making only $90,000 a year? “Boo-hoo,” said Daniel Roberts in CNN.com. Kevin Roose’s “fun and fast” group portrait of investment banking’s latest crop of recruits “will make you laugh out loud” at times, but if there’s a message here, it’s merely that their work is more drudgery than power trip. Roose, a reporter for The New York Times before he jumped to New York magazine, won surprising candidness from the eight newbie hires he tracked during their first two years inside the country’s biggest investment banks. As 110-hour workweeks and endless spreadsheets take over their lives, we see relationships crash, ideals wither, and $25,000 bonuses turn from fantasy windfalls into insults. But “it’s unclear who the audience is.” The New York media have gone wild for this book, but does the rest of America care?

Roose has at least identified a shift in the culture, said Michael Mechanic in MotherJones.com. Some of the most “telling stats” he cites suggest that post-crash Wall Street has lost its allure for graduates of elite universities: Only 12 percent of Princeton’s class of 2012 took jobs in finance, compared with 46 percent in 2006. Three of Roose’s eight youngsters actually wind up quitting banking to join the current rush toward the technology sector. “Google, it seems, is the new Goldman Sachs.”

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One priceless scene shifts focus entirely, said Drew Toal in NPR.org. Leaving the industry’s plebes aside, Roose infiltrates an exclusive black-tie dinner and watches various Wall Street kingpins performing tasteless skits that make fun of women, gays, and the poor. “Pitch-perfect” as the telling is, it fits Roose’s story only in hinting that some fledglings might one day act no differently. Maybe the pattern has been broken, though said Nick Summers in BloombergBusinessweek. A generation ago, Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker made Wall Street look like “a rigged-to-blow casino” and inadvertently recruited a whole generation. Roose’s update may well have the opposite effect. “The last book I read with characters this miserable was a novel set in North Korea.”