Present Value : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Everything A Man In Full Should have been.
Review: This is a smart funny cruel book about the loathsome rich and the geek lawyers who serve them. A perfect cultural referent to early 21st century America-captures the mood post-September 11 and mid-Enron. Career-driven blackberry-sporting soulless seniorpartners, rich kids, the professional bankruptcy industry and corporate executives to whom ethics must be a vaguely distasteful foreign idea all take it on on the chin There is some silly naming (The main law firm is "Elboe, Fromme $ Athol" certain Washington characters are named after Shakespeare's Henry IV characters and the 2002 Red Sox are represented by goats) which is not distracting enough to detract from the story. This is the book Tom Wolfe must have wished he wrote. Also some good simple descriptions of how complicated financial transactions work.

Rating:
Summary: Skewers corporate greed and the bankruptcy process
Review: While short of a great book such as Bonfire of the Vanities, Present Value succeeds as social commentary and as a great yarn with interesting characters. The types are extreme -- the power-and communication-obsessed wife and the distant son -- but they obviously are based on what's out there. Having lived through a Ch 11 bankruptcy (in middle mgt, close enough to see the upper echelon's behavior and its all-too-evident flaws), I thought that the descriptions of the exec's, their greed, and their cluelessness were priceless. I'd recommend this book to just about anyone.

Rating:
Summary: Must Read
Review: Wow! I don't really know how to classify this one but its eyecatching cover made me stop and pick it up. It's about a family with all the things they could want, but things don't hold a family together,as we find out. When Fritz Bubanker is fired from his firm and sent to jail for insider trading his family life changes for the better. Has an interesting plot twist and great flash backs of fritz's college econimic lessons.

Rating:
Summary: Satire? Naw, reality!
Review: Wow, he nailed it. If you ever worked for a large corporation, particularly at the executive level, you KNOW these people. Yeah, Willet trashes the CEO and portrays him as a self-centered incompetent, but he couldn't have built a company that successful without a brain and some astute politicing. But all the ladder-climbing, and ass-covering, and back stabbing, and greed, and...he got it right.

Sent a copy to my Father-in-Law and he dropped it at about page 100, just when it really getting good. Said it was too negative. He does lambast corporate excess and people that think good and bad are the same as right and wrong. But the plot is interesting, the characters well developed, and emotions and dialogu well played.

I loved it.