American Sucker

January 1, 2004
When New Yorker film critic Denby begins his memoir, the year is 1999 and his marriage had just ended. "Having lost the greatest thing in my life," he says, "I feared I would lose another and another." So Denby sets out to ride the NASDAQ bull. What follows is his account of making and losing over $900,000 as the NASDAQ crests and collapses. All the while, Denby carries on a running meditation on greed. He recalls a time when investment was "part of pop culture" and even the guys selling papers had stock tips to pass on. Boutsikaris, the Obie-winning actor who reads the memoir, offers a tour de force performance. He understands irony, managing, in the space of a few moments, to sound self-indulgent, self-deprecating, stunningly sincere and painfully intellectual. At times, the author gets caught up in discussing the history of other booms and the nature of capitalism, but the energy level of Boutsikaris's reading never flags. He captures the author's sense of wonder and betrayal and Denby's final realization that, despite maladies aplenty, the economy remains resilient, as does he.

September 15, 2003
Desperate to buy his departed wife's share of their home, movie critic Denby invests in the stock market-and loses big.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2003
The stock market was booming in 2000, and Denby, film critic for the " New Yorker" and author of " Great Books" (1996), found himself channeling his anger and grief over his wife's decision to end their 18-year marriage into investing. Convinced that the only way to redeem his shattered life--and hold on to the comfy Manhattan apartment he and his wife, the novelist Cathleen Schine, and their two teenage sons had called home--was to make $1 million, this humanistic critic became utterly obsessed with trading, even using his journalist credentials to get close to the likes of Sam Waksal, founder of ImClone, one of the hot but doomed companies fueling the now infamous high-tech bubble. Denby is always worth reading, but he really tops himself in this riveting apologia. Habitually observant and eloquently analytical, possessed of a deep frame of reference and philosophical turn of mind, Denby turns his chronicle of trading madness into a compelling meditation on greed, time, the "great ends of life," and the baffling phenomenon of mass delusion. "We can be suckered by apparent success," Denby writes, "but the greater fault is to be suckered by failure."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)