Book of the week: The Zeroes by Randall Lane

(Portfolio, $27.95)

In the same way that Michael Lewis chronicled circa-1980s Wall Street in Liar’s Poker, Randall Lane offers juicy insight into its recent excesses, said Jack Covert in Inc.com. As the editor of Trader Monthly magazine, “Lane was smack dab in the middle of the lunacy,” and he’s not afraid to name names or describe the pervasive greed “with an insider’s eye.”

The author’s account of what makes modern-day moneymen tick is “marvelously readable, and also misleading,” said Ian McGugan in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Lane humorously contrasts his own circumstances—a cramped apartment well stocked with off-brand peanut butter—with those of his magazine’s manse-owning readers, who thought nothing of ordering $175 Kobe beef burgers. But his account seems somewhat disingenuous, considering that all along he had intended to “make his own fortune by giving luxury advertisers a forum to reach this small but growing mob of ultrarich arrivistes.”

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