Reviews
From The New Gilded Age "The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not 'feminine' domesticity but female power, of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips." -"Everywoman.com," by Joan Didion "If the speculative boom turns to bust, [Alan] Greenspan will be held responsible for allowing it to get going in the first place. His current reputation will seem as overvalued as an Internet stock." -"The Fountainhead," by John Cassidy "[Bill] Gates does not exactly look like a leader of men. Crowds do not part when he enters a room. His voice, though it has a high-pitched trill, does not command attention. There is no poetry in his speeches, no swagger in his gait. He is partial to wisecracks and to words like 'cool,' 'neat,' and 'super.' He sits slumped on a stage, looking less like a mogul than like a boy ordered to wear a suit." -"Hard Core," by Ken Auletta "I have decided that I want-I need-to make a million dollars in the stock market this year." -"The Quarter of Living Dangerously," by David Denby "An inside trader who uses a partner to do the investing has a built-in problem: keeping track of the partner is virtually impossible. There is no way to know whether the partner is tipping others. There is no way to know how much money the partner has made by trading on inside information; he can show you what Wall Street people call the confirms, but he might not be showing all the confirms or the relevant confirms." -"Marisa and Jeff," by Calvin Trillin "If there is in this story a single moment when I crossed the boundary between debtlessness and total financial mayhem, it's the first dollar that I put toward my life as a writer in New York. . . . It's hard to recognize that you're acting like a rich person when you're becoming increasingly poor." -"My Misspent Youth," by Meghan Daum "On the day last November when John Falcon learned that he had won forty-five million dollars in the New York State lottery, he realized with trepidation that he was finally going to have to do something about his teeth. At the time, Falcon was a struggling performance artist." -"Mr. Lucky," by Rebecca Mead "I was shocked when, a few years ago, my stepson, still a college lad of modest means, handed me the stray change on his bureau top-perhaps two dollars' worth-because he did not like to have it jangling in his pocket. Gratefully, even greedily, I accepted the handful of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. To me, once, these coins were huge in value. . . . Now spare pennies sit like a puddle of sludge in a dish on the counter at the post office or convenience store, and sometimes a salesclerk, rather than bother counting out four cents in change, blithely hands you a nickel." -"A Sense of Change," by John Updike
