Rating:  Summary: Too much James Cramer, not enough Wall Street Review: This is mostly a minibio of James Cramer with a lot of attention paid on the side to CNBC and Maria Bartiromo specifically. If you're very interested in Cramer, you can just go get his actual memoir. As for me, I am interested in Wall Street and the system of disseminating and evaluating information and opinion about stocks -- the conflicts of interest, the conventions, the legal rules, the strengths and weaknesses. I don't know how you can analyze those issues without spending time on the role and motivations of key research analysts, the position of the SEC and the communication conventions between companies and journalists, hedge fund and other money managers and the SEC. Any book claiming to treat these issues and focusing on 1998-2000 would have to deal extensively by the phenomenon represented by Mary Meeker and Harry Blodgett, which this book does not. The book focuses disproportionately and without explanation on a few TV personalities without treating the overall issue. Too bad for me. It would have been fine if the title had been accurate -- something about James Cramer. Or even "Crazy Days at CNBC." The data does not synthesize into any larger recommendation or theme. It comes across as an accurate chronology without analysis. The writing style is correspondingly dry.
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